This splitter has been developed to split full-experimental planet dumps but it's also possible to split regular planet dumps with it.

This is a new version of the tool based on libosmium.

This is the tool used to create the hosted extracts.

The splitter currently supports splitting by bounding-boxes, .poly-files known from osmosis and .osm polygon files (.osm files containing only closed ways). It implementes two different cutting algorithms (hard- and softcut), which of softcut is the default.

• ways stay complete, all used nodes are included (reference-complete)
• relations contains all members, even such that does not exist in the extract (not reference-complete)
• if one version of an object is inside the bbox, all versions are included in the extract (history-complete)
• dual pass processing required

Dumps created using that algorithm have the following characteristics:

• ways are cropped at bbox boundaries
• relations contain only members that exist in the extract
• ways and relations are reference-complete
• relations referring to relations that come later in the file are missing this references
• ways that have only one node inside the bbox are missing from the output
• only versions of an object that are inside the bboxes are in the extract, some versions of an object may be missing (not history-complete)
• way-deletes will not make it into the extract
• in summary: hardcut should only be used as a quick-and-dirty way to generate small files, you should not use it if you actually care what's inside the files…

• ways stay complete, all used nodes are included (reference-complete)
• all ways and nodes belonging to a relation that is inside the bbox are included
• if one version of an object is inside the bbox, all versions are included in the extract (history-complete)
• three pass processing required

In order to compile the splitter, you'll first need the osmium framework and most of its prequisites:

• zlib (for PBF support) http://www.zlib.net/ Debian/Ubuntu: zlib1g-dev
• Expat (for parsing XML files) http://expat.sourceforge.net/ Debian/Ubuntu: libexpat1-dev
• GEOS (for polygon checks) http://trac.osgeo.org/geos/ Debian/Ubuntu: libgeos-dev libgeos++-dev
• CMake

Libosmium needs to be present on your system. I recommend to git clone osmium directly from the repository. If you clone it in the same directory you cloned this repository in, the build scripts will find it.

To build:

mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make

After building the splitter you'll have a single binary: osm-history-splitter. The binary takes two parameters and a few options. The splitter is called like that:

./osm-history-splitter input.osm.pbf output.config

the splitter reads through input.osm.pbf and splitts it into the extracts listet in output.config. Optionally the following switches are supported:

• --hardcut - enable hardcut mode
• --softcut - enable softcut mode (default)
• --debug - enable debug output

The config-file-format is simple and line-based. Empty lines and lines beginning with # are ignored. A config-file might looks like this:

woerrstadt.osh.pbf    BBOX    8.1010,49.8303,8.1359,49.8567
gau-odernheim.osh     OSM     clipbounds/aaa_test/go.osm
germany.osh           POLY    clipbounds/europe/germany.poly

each line consists of three items, separated by spaces:

• the destination path and filename. The file-extension used specifies the generated file format (.osm, .osh, .osm.bz2, .osh.bz2, .osm.pbf, .osh.pbf)
• the type of extract (BBOX or POLY)
• the extract specification
  • for BBOX: boundaries of the bbox, eg. -180,-90,180,90 for the whole world
  • for OSM: path to an .osm file from which all closed ways are taken as outlines of a MultiPolygon. Relations are not taken into account, so holes are not possible.
  • for POLY: path to the .poly file

Either both, input and output needs to be history fils or none of them. You can read from an .osh.pbf and write raw-xml .osh files but you can't write to any of the .osm.[pbf|bz2|gz]-type, because these file-types can't store history information. This is true both ways: you can read .osm.bz2 and write .osm.pbf, to give an example, but you can't write to an .osh.pbf because there is no history information in the source file while the destination files is specified as a history file. If you miss this rule, osmium will throw an Osmium::OSMFile::FileTypeOSMExpected exception.

The POLY files are in Osmosis' *.poly file format. A huge set of .poly files can be found at Geofabrik (obey the README!) and some tools to work with .poly files are located in the OpenStreetMap SVN.

If you are planning to do a huge number of extracts (something like the Geofabrik does), the split-all-clipbounds.py may be your friend. It scans through the clipbounds directory looking for .poly files (.osm files possible), automatically generates config-files and runs the splitter. It does obey the nesting-rules (ie europe/germany.osm.pbf is generated from europe.osm.pbf) and also ensures the files are created in the correct order.

If you have any questions open an issue on Github.