Am 22.09.2010 15:23, schrieb Grant Slater:
I quite like the .osm.bz2 format. I don't see it being kicked off http://planet.osm.org anytime soon. Parallel distribution is an option.
Yes it hast definitive advantages as a primary data source. The biggest one that I can see is, that it is easily readable without any special sourcecode.
The bzip2 source is well known and very well distributed. There are million of sources on the web and in books where one can get information on how to decompress the format.
The XML underneath can be read as plain text and is very readable. Even without a full blown xml parser it is possible to parse the information out of it.
In contrast the osm protobuf format needs special knowledge about the format and special Sourcecode to read it. If the Nuclear Winter comes and the internet breaks down, I still can parse the planet.osm.bz2 with a book of bip2 source and some hacking but I will have a lot more work to do in order to read a planet.osm.pbf.
Also it would be somehow odd to have the planet in pbf and the changes in xml..
Peter _______________________________________________ dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
