Welcome to the PgOSM project! The goal of this project is to make it simpler to load an OpenStreetMap .pbf file into PostGIS. Additionally, the resulting data structure provides spatial analysts easier access to open-source spatial data. One focus of this project is to be easy to setup and run on low-power (e.g. non-server) hardware. The target machine for this process is a virtual machine within a consumer-grade laptop given 1GB ram and a single core processor.

See included LICENSE file for more details about licensing.

In a nutshell, the process looks like this:

• Download OSM PBF file
• osm2pgsql loads PBF -> Postgres
• pgosm converts into user-defined layer tables
• Happy spatial data analysis!

The pgosm database is intended to be short-lived, disposable, and not on a production server. This process trashes your I/O for a while, depending on your hardware and the size of the data being processed.

The RustProof Labs blog has a two-part post explaining how to load OpenStreetMap data to PostGIS using PgOSM

• Step 1: Load OSM PBF to PostGIS
• Step 2: Transform OpenStreetMap data in PostGIS

When data is loaded from osm2pgsql into your database you're left with a set of three (3) planet_osm_* tables split based on type of geometry, not by type of data.

• public.planet_osm_point
• public.planet_osm_line
• public.planet_osm_polygon

This means that all the data representing waterways are found in the table public.planet_osm_line. So are all the roads, sidewalks, rivers, railways, and administrative boundaries. This setup makes it impossible for an analyst used to a properly normalized relational database to simply connect to the database and be productive.

When pgosm runs it creates a schema named osm and loads layer-specific data into each table. The current default configuration generates 38 tables of logically grouped data. A few examples:

• osm.road_line
• osm.natural_point
• osm.building_polygon
• osm.waterway_line

The natural_point layer, for example, contains trees, peaks, and other items with nature-related tags in OpenStreetMap.