OSM queries on history?

Question

I would like to get a list of modifications on the OSM database, in a given bounding box, between two given dates and impacting a given set of tags.

Does anyone know how to do this?

Any command-line tool, webapp such as Overpass Turbo, or query API such as XAPI?

I have seen it's possible to get history of a map by its location and zoom level (example: http://www.openstreetmap.org/history#map=16/45.9605/5.3391 ), but this return groups of modification that contains modifications outside of the current map).

I have also seen a history browser to browse history of a given object (node, way or relation).

Answer 1

The best solution we found is to use Overpass-Turbo "diff" functionnality.

Here is the XML script I use to get changes on roads in a given bounding box, between 2 dates:

<osm-script date="2014-09-21T15:00:00Z" from="2012-09-14T15:00:00Z">
  <union>
    <query type="way">
      <has-kv k="highway"/>
    <bbox-query {{bbox}}/>
    </query>
  </union>
  <print mode="body"/>
  <recurse type="down"/>
  <print mode="skeleton" order="quadtile"/>
</osm-script>

And here is the equivalent in Overpass QL:

[diff:"2012-09-14T15:00:00Z","2014-09-21T15:00:00Z"];
(
  way["highway"]({{bbox}});
);
out body;
>;
out skel qt;

Answer 2

You can look at the OSM-Full-History-Dump File. Every change that has been made ever to an osm feature (geometry or attributes) is saved in this file.

Using the OSM-History-Splitter (https://github.com/MaZderMind/osm-history-splitter) to clip the OSM history file to a BBOX and use the OSM-History-Importer (https://github.com/MaZderMind/osm-history-renderer) to import the clipped file into a PostGIS databse. You can download some pre-clipped files from here (http://osm.personalwerk.de/full-history-extracts/lates). However, you can't import relations as there are not yet supported by the tool.

Some time ago I wrote a tool called iOSMAnalyzer (https://github.com/zehpunktbarron/iOSMAnalyzer). With this, it is possible to run intrinsic OpenStreetMap analyses based on the OSM-Full-History file. I'd recommend to only use the SQLs within the scripts because the tool itself is very buggy as I'm not familiar with coding.