Hello OSM developers, Over the last few years I have worked on several pieces of software that consume and produce the PBF format. I have always appreciated the advantages of PBF over XML for our use cases, but over time it became apparent to me that PBF is significantly more complex than would be necessary to meet its objectives of speed and compactness.
Based on my observations about the effectiveness of various techniques used in PBF and other formats, I devised an alternative OSM representation that is consistently about 8% smaller than PBF but substantially simpler to encode and decode. This work is presented in an article at http://conveyal.com/blog/2015/04/27/osm-formats/. I welcome any comments you may have on this article or on the potential for a shift to simpler binary OSM formats. Regards, Andrew Byrd
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