Extract OSM snapshots for any point in time from geofabrik osh.pbf files

Question

Has anybody successfully extracted OSM snapshots for any point in time from geofabrik osh.pbf files and convert them to shape files? I need to extract data from 1 year ago to compare with current data in order to find changes in road network. I was informed by Geofabrik that it's possible with programs like osmium-tools but I've had a hard time trying to get it installed on a windows machine. Are there any other tools available for windows with this capability?

Answer 1

There are two ways to solve your problem, depending on the size and the required output:

1) Set up a virtual maschine (linux) and use the OSM-History-Splitter (https://github.com/MaZderMind/osm-history-splitter) to clip an 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. PostGIS offers a rich set of tools to analyze changes in geometrie and/or tags. The OSM-History-Importer offers some nice visualizations.

2) Use Overpass-Turbo "augmented-diffs". From the wiki-page:

The augmented diff offers comparison of the result of the same query in two different times. The final result contains all the data of nodes/ways/relations with difference between the starting time and the ending time. (It does not take notice of any intermediate change.)

Your query could look somehow like this: http://overpass-turbo.eu/s/pI5

Export your selection as GeoJSON and open it in QGIS. For each feature you'll find the attributes of both timestamps from your comparison and/or the changed geometry of the feature.