Meaning of the spatialite scheme generated by the spatialite_osm_map tool

Question

I used the spatialite_osm_map tool to generate a spatialite database from an .osm.pbf file. After the process was finished, a series of tables were generated in the database as shown in the image.

I noticed that there were 3 groups of tables based on the prefixes of their names: In_, pg_ and pt_. I also noticed that the rest of the name corresponded to a key defined in OpenStreetMap.

Can someone explain to me how the information is distributed in each of these groups and tables? I've searched for a site that explains the resulting schema after the conversion, but I've only found information on how to use the tool.

Answer 1

I think you have already identified the key points of this scheme.

It's main purpose is to offer the data from OSM in a way who could be more direct and intuitive for a GIS user. The data is splited according to OSM tags (aerialway, aeroway, amenity, etc., you can change the list of tags to be used if you don't need all of them) and according to the type of geometry (pt_* for points, ln_* for lines, and pg_* for polygons) so these tables (which could be directly seen as "layers" by a GIS user) can quickly be styled (for example in a GIS desktop application such as QGIS) with simple rules due to this simple schema (for example one can set rules like green for pg_natural, blue for ln_waterway and pg_waterway, or just click on the "pg_building" layer to toggle its visibility). That schema doesn't preserve all the objects from the OSM database, but only those requested to build the tables for the requested tags.

Contrary to the original way of storing OSM objects, with this kind of extraction you will lose the relationships between objects (for example in OSM the same node can be used, let's say, as part of the relationship describing an administrative boundary and as part of a road; here you will get a road line in ln_road and a polygon in pg_boundary but you will loose the information that they were maybe partially sharing nodes). Notably due to this last point, the weight of the OSM extractions can be relatively high compared to the original file.

So I guess that this kind of scheme (which is one amongst other existing ways to transform OSM data) offers an interesting abstraction for those who are not accustomed to the OSM schema which use Node, Way and Relation elements (eg, in OSM, buildings can be represented as closed way or as relation, here you get "simply" polygons for these various buildings).