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OSM Express

Manual, Programming Guide

OSM Express is a fast storage format for OpenStreetMap that powers Protomaps tools. It's designed as a low level building block specific to the OSM data model; common access patterns such as random lookups by ID, in-place minutely updates, and spatial queries are efficient and simple to manage in production applications.

Features

• Random access: Look up nodes, ways and relations and their metadata by ID; fetch member elements of ways and relations to construct geometries.
• Spatial indexing: Nodes are bucketed into S2 Geometry cells. Access a region by providing a cell covering; works for nonrectangular regions.
• Scalable: OSM Express works the same way for OSM data of any size, from a small city to the entire planet. The entire planet can be worked with efficiently on typical hardware such as a laptop computer.
• In-place updates: Included are scripts to download minutely changesets from planet.openstreetmap.org and apply them to an .osmx database.
• Concurrent access: Multiple processes can open the database file for reading simultaneously. No running server process is required. Writing minutely updates doesn't block reader access. Reads and writes are transactional.
• Portable: An .osmx file can be read and written to from either C++ or Python.

Details

OSM Express is a compact 1,500 LOC, and really a cobbling together of a few low-level libraries:

• Libosmium for the reading and writing of .osm.pbf files.
• LMDB for a memory-mapped ACID key-value store with fast cursor iteration.
• Cap'n Proto for in-memory and on-disk representation of OSM elements.
• CRoaring for in-memory representation of ID sets as compressed bitmaps.
• S2 Geometry for indexing of geographic coordinates.

Installation

Binary releases are available at Releases.

See the manual for instructions on building from source.

Usage

OSM Express is being used in production, but should still be considered experimental with an unstable API.

• Use the osmx command line tool to expand a .osm.pbf to an .osmx database and perform basic tasks such as extracting regions or querying by ID. No programming required.
• Use the Python library library via pip install osmx to access an .osmx database programatically. See the Python Examples for how to create command line tools, webservers or detailed diffs based on minutely data.
• Use the C++ library to access an .osmx database programatically.

Command line

osmx expand planet.osm.pbf planet.osmx # converts a pbf or xml to osmx. Takes 5-10 hours for the planet, resulting in a ~600GB file.
osmx extract planet.osmx extract.osm.pbf --bbox 40.7411\,-73.9937\,40.7486\,-73.9821 # extract a new pbf for the given bounding box.
osmx update planet.osmx 3648548.osc 3648548 2019-08-29T17:50:02Z --commit # applies an OsmChange diff.
osmx query planet.osmx # Print statistics, seqnum and timestamp.
osmx query planet.osmx way 34633854 # look up an element by ID.

osmx extract has a flag --noUserData intended for public facing instances which will remove the user, uid and changeset fields to comply with GDPR guidelines.

Detailed command line usage can be found in the Manual.

Headers

The C++ API is currently very rough with minimal abstraction. examples/way_wkt.cpp is a short, commented C++ program that uses the headers to read a way from a .osmx file and outputs its Well-Known Text LineString geometry.

./way_wkt ../ny.osmx 34633854
Empire State Building	LINESTRING (-73.9864855 40.7484833,-73.9851554 40.7479226,-73.9848259 40.7483735,-73.9861526 40.7489422,-73.9863111 40.7487242,-73.9863282 40.7487007,-73.9864684 40.7485078,-73.9864855 40.7484833)

examples/bbox_wkt.cpp is a more complex example that takes a bounding box as input, and returns WKT LineStrings for ways that overlap the bbox. This overlap is an approximation based on cells and may include ways outside the bounding box.

Detailed C++ usage can be found in the Programming Guide.

Docker (experimental)

A Dockerfile is provided but users will need to build their own container. To do so, run:

docker build -t osmx .

License and Development

2-Clause BSD, see LICENSE.md. Bug reports, pull requests welcome! For support, new features, and integration, contact brandon@protomaps.com.