Geo-Object Bundle
Geo-Object Bundle (GOB) is a file format for OpenStreetMap data. It is a compressed form of a Geo-Object Library (GOL), typically reducing its size by half.
Like GOLs, GOBs don't store editor metadata or object history. Each GOB represents a point-in-time snapshot of an OSM dataset.
Key characteristics
- Compactness: A GOB is on average 30% smaller than the equivalent data as OSM-PBF. As of October 2025, a planet-size GOB is less than 50 GB.
- Fast to import: On a modern workstation, loading a planet-size GOB into a GOL has been measured at under three minutes (about 5x faster than building a GOL from a PBF file, and two orders of magnitude faster than an import into a traditional database).
- GOBs are organized into tiles, enabling easy extracts of regional subsets.
Working with GOBs
Support for GOBs is available in the GOL Tool (v2.1 and later) via the load and save commands.
To import a GOL:
gol load france planet -a fr.wkt
loads all tiles from planet.gob into france.gol that intersect the area described in fr.wkt. The GOL is created if it doesn't yet exist. If no area is specified, all tiles are loaded from the GOB.
Starting with v2.2, gol load can also download tiles directly from a URL:
gol load paris https://download.openplanetdata.com/osm/planet/gob/v2/planet-latest.osm.gob \
-a 2.38,48.81,2.25,48.83,2.24,48.86,2.3,48.9,2.41,48.91,2.43,48.84,2.38,48.81
downloads the region of metropolitan Paris into paris.gol from Open Planet Data.
To save tiles to a GOB:
gol save planet japan -a jpn.wkt