ReadOSM is an open source library to extract valid data from within an Open Street Map input file. Such OSM files come in two different formats:

• files identified by the .osm suffix simply are plain XML files.
• files identified by the .osm.pbf suffix does containt the same identical data, but adopting the Google's Protocol Buffer serialization format and thus requiring much less storage space.

• to be simple and lightweight
• to be stable, robust and efficient
• to be easily and universally portable
• making the whole parsing process of both .osm or .osm.pbf files completely transparent from the application own perspective.

ReadOSM is structurally simple and quite light-weight (typically about 20K of object code, stripped).

ReadOSM is licensed under the MPL tri-license terms; you are free to choose the best-fit license between:

• the MPL 1.1
• the GPL v2.0 or any subsequent version
• the LGPL v2.1 or any subsequent version