OSM XML Schema?

Where is the OSM XML Schema gone as discussed in http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/XML_Schema? What is the actual status? Isn’t JOSM based on it?

Regarding the background of my question: I’m currently working on some mobile Wireless Sensor Network (WSN, see e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_sensor_network) stuff and especially on simulating such things. We have developed a mobility model moving nodes on some virtual road grid which is btw automatically generated from real GPS traces. I would like to create the possibility to additionally download OSM maps to run the simulated nodes on them. Building a JOSM plugin using the algorithms to generate the maps based on GPS traces might be a second project, since the generated maps are surprisingly good but not perfect - which is no surprise…:wink:

OSM data can be stored in a lot of different ways (binary, databases, XML, etc) and there is no real standard. However for simple off-line use the XML format is most common: It is used by the planet dump file and also JOSM.

Download one of the .osm files to see if the format has changes (I don’t think so). One thing to keep in mind, there is talk about a new mechanism devised to how to describe the world without using segments. So the XML format may change in the near future.

Edit: The change to a segmentless world is already ongoing

Hi Lambertus, thank you for your prompt answer! :slight_smile:

I studied the Wiki also and came across these points. Another issue answered in the Wiki is the question regarding the use of OGC standards - especially GML might be interesting I think. But my experiences with the OGC standards are: extremly complex or let’s say ‘over-engineered’, nearly all XML Tools have problems with that stuff and there is only very sparse tool support on the part of the OGC itself. Further more Web Services in terms of the W3C, which might be also interesting for OSM, seems to be a foreign word to the OGC. Nevertheless GML etc. are already or are upcoming ISO standards. :expressionless:

Back to my initial question: I’m used to take some schema which can be feed in some nice tool and generate code which only needs some functional additions… :slight_smile: …and looking at some XML documents obviously gives me an idea about the structure but no formal specification. This tends to result in some hack which works only in most cases…:rolleyes:

The article about the ‘segmentless world’ let’s me assume that the changes are already final but there is no adapted schema yet? Can somebody point me to an instance of the old Schema? Maybe which revision of the repository I need to checkout? If I can help to adapt the schema I would be happy to do that.

Hmm, well no pointer to a schema then. But you may take a look around in the SVN repository. There are plenty of tools working on the XML doctype as used by OSM. Now that you mention it…I seem to remember that someone had done some work on describing the XML doctype recently. I’ll look for it.

The protocol description of the (very soon) upcoming 0.5 API 0.5 and .osm file is here.