Hello OSM developers, Last spring I posted an article discussing some shortcomings of the PBF format and proposing a simpler binary OSM interchange format called VEX. There was a generally positive response at the time, including helpful feedback from other developers. Since then I have revised the VEX specification as well as our implementation, and Conveyal has been using this format in our own day-to-day work.
I have written a new article describing of the revised format: http://conveyal.com/blog/2016/02/06/vex-format-part-two <http://conveyal.com/blog/2016/02/06/vex-format-part-two> The main differences are 1) it is more regular and even simpler to parse; and 2) file blocks are compressed individually, allowing parallel processing and seeking to specific entity types. It is no longer smaller than PBF, but still comparable in size. Again, I would welcome any comments you may have on the revised format and the potential for a shift to simpler binary OSM formats. Regards, Andrew Byrd > On 29 Apr 2015, at 01:35, andrew byrd <[email protected]> wrote: > > Hello OSM developers, > > Over the last few years I have worked on several pieces of software that > consume and produce the PBF format. I have always appreciated the advantages > of PBF over XML for our use cases, but over time it became apparent to me > that PBF is significantly more complex than would be necessary to meet its > objectives of speed and compactness. > > Based on my observations about the effectiveness of various techniques used > in PBF and other formats, I devised an alternative OSM representation that is > consistently about 8% smaller than PBF but substantially simpler to encode > and decode. This work is presented in an article at > http://conveyal.com/blog/2015/04/27/osm-formats/ > <http://conveyal.com/blog/2015/04/27/osm-formats/>. I welcome any comments > you may have on this article or on the potential for a shift to simpler > binary OSM formats. > > Regards, > Andrew Byrd > _______________________________________________ > dev mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
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