Overview: We are attempting to clean up and revise the OSM data of our County by comparing it to a more accurate (public domain licensed) street layer within the ArcGIS Editor for OpenStreetMap. First, we downloaded a planet dump .bz2 file of California roads from Cloudmade. Next, using Osmosis and the approximate coordinates of our County, we clipped the .bz2 to a more manageable size for quicker loading into ArcGIS. Finally, using OSM Simple Loader tool, we brought the .bz2 into a feature dataset in ArcGIS.
Question: How can we properly set up Geodatabase tables for the feature dataset to be able to synchronize the .bz2 dump with the most current data on OSM servers? I understand that it requires a specific schema to work properly, we want to make sure we can update the planet dump, so we are editing against the most recent data. We need help with this final step.
Best Answer
While 'OSM Loader' http://arcscripts.esri.com/details.asp?dbid=15137 will load a .bz2 file into a geodatabase - the 'Load OSM File' tool in the OpenStreetMap Toolbox will only load .osm files.
We used the 'OSM Tools' plugin for QuantumGIS(QGIS) http://qgis.dbsgeo.com/ - specifically the 'Process OSM data (osmosis)' tool to clip a Statewide planet.bz2 to our County bounding box and specified our output as .osm instead of .bz2
The .osm file can then be loaded with the 'Load OSM File' tool in the OpenStreetMap Toolbox, and the appropriate 'change/revision-tables' are populated.