Osmosis consists of a series of pluggable components that can be chained together to perform a larger operation. For example, it has components for reading from database and from file, components for writing to database and to file, components for deriving and applying change sets to data sources, components for sorting data, etc. It has been written so that it is easy to add new features without re-writing common tasks such as file or database handling.

Some examples of the things it can currently do are:

    * Generate planet dumps from a database
    * Load planet dumps into a database
    * Produce change sets using database history tables
    * Apply change sets to a local database
    * Compare two planet files and produce a change set
    * Re-sort the data contained in planet files
    * Extract data inside a bounding box or polygon