Esy-osmfilter – A Python Library to Efficiently Extract OpenStreetMap Data. Issue 1 (1st September 2020)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Pluta, Adam; Lünsdorf, Ontje
• Is Part Of: Journal of open research software. Volume 8:Issue 1(2020)
• Publication Date: 2020-09-01
• Subjects: OSM -- OpenStreetMap -- Python -- GeoJSON -- PBF -- Protocol buffers -- GeoJSON -- geo; Computer software -- Reusability -- Periodicals; Open source software -- Periodicals; 005
• DOI: 10.5334/jors.317
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 2049-9647

Abstract

OpenStreetMap is the largest freely accessible geographic database of the world. The necessary processing steps to extract information from this database, namely reading, converting and filtering, can be very consuming in terms of computational time and disk space. esy-osmfilter is a Python library designed to read and filter OpenStreetMap data under optimization of disc space and computational time. It uses parallelized prefiltering for the OSM pbf-files data in order to quickly reduce the original data size. It can store the prefiltered data to the hard drive. In the main filtering process, these prefiltered data can be reused repeatedly to identify different items with the help of more specialized main filters. At the end, the output can be exported to the GeoJSON format.