esy-osmfilter – A Python Library to Efficiently Extract OpenStreetMap Data

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.

Funding statement: This work was funded as part of DLR Institute for Networked Energy Systems project SciGRID_gas by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy (BMWi) within the funding of the 6. Energieforschungsprogramm der Bundesregierung. Funding Code: 03ET4063.