This blog post contains a summary on how you can write your own Java classes to process OpenStreetMap (OSM) pbf files. PBF is a compression format, which is nowadays more or less the standard utilized for reading and writing OSM data quickly. In the OSM world, many tools and programs implemented this file format (you can find additional information here). However, I think the following samples for reading and writing such compressed OSM data can be very helpful. In particular, if someone has to create some sort of test data or has to read some specific mapped objects of interest for her/his own project. The well-known Java Osmosis tool (command line application for processing OSM data), provides several libraries that are the basis for this brief tutorial.

Step 1: Maven is the key – If your Java project is already managed by Maven, you can just add the following lines to your pom.xml. It downloads and adds the required jar-files that are needed to process compressed OSM data to your project.