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Is it possible to get OSM history from the very first changeset (even better for specific territory)? I checked planet minute diffs and they seems to be starting from 2012 (https://planet.openstreetmap.org/replication/minute/000/000/001.state.txt).

I also tried adiff from overpass and it works, but it usually hangs and cannot effectively process even rather small territory.

asked 30 Aug '18, 21:12

Sergey%20Karavay's gravatar image

Sergey Karavay
539182134
accept rate: 0%


Well if your specific territory is not England then the earth will be void and without form ;)

Your best bet is downloading the "full history" file from planet.openstreetmap.org (also available per-contry on download.geofabrik.de) and decoding that. It will contain historic versions of data.

There's a couple things that you should know:

  • The current API version is 0.6 which was introduced in April of 2009. Before that, OSM did not have changesets. Hence, changesets for earlier edits are made up by automatically grouping edits made by the same user.
  • API 0.5 was introduced in October 2007. This was when we started using relations, and ways were composed of nodes; before API 0.5, there was another data type called segment (each segment connecting 2 nodes), and ways were built from segments. You will find some nodes older than October 2007 in the history planet but not segments or ways; you can download old planet files that still have segments but processing them is difficult.
  • In September 2012 we changed the license to ODbL. This meant we had to remove all old contributions that weren't released by their authors under this new license. Since these objects have been "redacted" i.e. removed from the history file, you cannot get an accurate picture of pre-September 2012 data from a current history file; you'd have to go back to the CC-BY-SA files also available on planet.openstreetmap.org - but it is difficult legally to combine CC-BY-SA and ODbL data in one work since this can easily lead to a requirement of publishing the result under CC-BY-SA only and under ODbL only.
permanent link

answered 30 Aug '18, 21:59

Frederik%20Ramm's gravatar image

Frederik Ramm ♦
82.5k927201273
accept rate: 23%

edited 30 Aug '18, 22:13

1

Aha, so this is why Planet OSM diffs starts in 2012? Thanks.

(31 Aug '18, 07:58) Sergey Karavay
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question asked: 30 Aug '18, 21:12

question was seen: 1,607 times

last updated: 31 Aug '18, 07:58

NOTICE: help.openstreetmap.org is no longer in use from 1st March 2024. Please use the OpenStreetMap Community Forum