Planetdiff

The tools and format described here are not used on OSM servers. See OsmChange for the format that is currently used.

Software described on this page or in this section is unlikely to be compatible with API v0.6 (current version) deployed in 2009.
If you have fixed the software, or concluded that this notice does not apply, remove it.

(note: largely copied from https://svn.openstreetmap.org/applications/utils/planetdiff/readme.txt)

Generates a file containing the differences between two planet.osm dumps. For other methods of representing changes between sets of OSM data see OSM XML.

The program supports .gz and .bz2 compressed files transparently. It also runs an internal version of UTF8sanitizer on the input data so that it can be used on a file downloaded from https://planet.openstreetmap.org without needing any other manipulation.

Note that the algorithm used relies on the strict ordering of data in the planet.osm file to operate correctly. Data produced by other OSM tools normally do not follow these rules and can not be manipulated using this program.

Diff file format

The diff format is an XML file containing OSM objects to delete and add. Objects which are modified have both a delete and add section. The format of each section is a copy of the OSM object from the planet.osm file.

 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
 <planetdiff version="0.1" generator="OpenStreetMap planetdiff" from="a.osm" to="b.osm">
   <add>
     <node id="10310557" timestamp="2006-07-10 23:17:35" lat="51.7670078090236" lon="-0.471281873153888">
       <tag k="created_by" v="JOSM"/>
     </node>
   </add>
   <add>
     <node id="13602100" timestamp="2006-08-16 00:02:13" lat="51.778541285096" lon="-0.448173637230418"/>
   </add>
   <delete>
     <node id="26983956" lat="51.77874880458334" lon="-0.450481106821043">
       <tag k="created_by" v="JOSM"/>
     </node>
   </delete>
   <add>
     <node id="26983956" lat="51.77874880458334" lon="-0.450481106821043">
       <tag k="created_by" v="JOSMXX"/>
     </node>
   </add>
 ...
 </planetdiff>

The data must be in the exact order it is to be applied to the planet dump. The format is really based the output of "diff -u" but applied to XML. It is not a general diffing program between two sets of data, for that see osmosis.

Example usage

planetdiff

This example shows how the tool can be used to extract the differences between two planet.osm dumps. The errors below are from the UTF8sanitizer code and can be ignored.

$ planetdiff planet-070307.osm.bz2 planet-070321.osm.bz2 > delta2.xml
$ bzip2 -c delta2.xml > delta2.xml.bz2
$ ls -l
-rw-rw-r-- 1 jburgess jburgess   10732308 Apr  6 11:41 delta2.xml.bz2
-rw-rw-r-- 1 jburgess jburgess  147704026 Apr  6 03:50 delta2.xml
-rw-rw-r-- 1 jburgess jburgess  186168637 Mar  7 20:21 planet-070307.osm.bz2
-rw-rw-r-- 1 jburgess jburgess  193761852 Mar 22 19:24 planet-070321.osm.bz2

The planet.osm file can be regenerated using planetpatch below. The compressed diff file is only 10MB which is a much smaller download than a whole new planet.osm dump.

planetpatch

The patch file generated by the planetdiff example above is used to regenerate the planet-070321.osm file:

$ time planetpatch planet-070307.osm.bz2 delta2.xml > regen.xml 

Processing: node(8420k)
Processing: segment(8830k)
Processing: way(370k)Error at line 72505269
Processing: way(380k)Error at line 72583739
Processing: way(430k)

real    19m54.654s
user    12m59.771s
sys     3m35.929s 

The output file, in this case 'regen.xml' should now be the same as an uncompressed and UTF8sanitized version of planet-070321.osm.bz2

Download

To compile it on Ubuntu 9.10, just do the following:

sudo apt-get install subversion zlib1g-dev libbz2-dev libxml2-dev 
svn checkout https://svn.openstreetmap.org/applications/utils/planetdiff/
cd planetdiff
make planetdiff

Here you can download precompiled binary for Ubuntu 9.10. Simply extract the archive and execute planetpatch as above.