27 Oct 25
New OSM file format: 30% smaller than PBF, 5x faster to import - General talk - OpenStreetMap Community Forum
The OSM dataset is huge, and keeps growing every day. Great news, of course, but sometimes the sheer volume can be overwhelming – there are just gobs and gobs of data!
Hence, we created GOB (“Geo-Object Bundle”), a new file format that makes tackling OSM data faster and easier. It’s a companion format to our now-familiar Geo-Object Library (essentially, a tightly-compressed GOL with its indexes stripped).
To support this new format, GOL Tool 2.1 has two new commands: save GOLs as GOBs and load GOBs into a GOL (Of course, like all of the GeoDesk Toolkit, the GOL Tool is free & open-source).