Statistics or data about "Search" option in the OSM Website

Is there any kind of statistics about what the OSM users search on the main website? Or something like a raw dataset including every single value.

This could give an idea of what people is looking, and how to focus our mapping efforts.

For example, a country community could be focused in mapping highways, but its users (not mappers) are looking for political division (neighbourhoods, cities, places).

A list like that could give an idea about what to map next. Currently, it is based on our assumptions as mappers, but not as users.

4 Likes

I would be intensely interested in seeing the results. I wonder if we could tie the frequency of specific term searches to geographical areas too.

Way back we included language in the Nominatim ToS to allow use of the query strings for such purposes (at the time I was thinking about missing data), that then back in 2018 made itself in the the OSMFs provacy policy Privacy Policy - OpenStreetMap Foundation This isn’t the 1st request for access to the data (historically there has been at least a handful of researchers that wanted access).

However nobody has ever done the work to produce an anonymized data set from the input strings that could be made public. This isn’t a trivial task, and it isn’t clear if it can even be done in a reasonable fashion.

6 Likes

Is there any public sample of the data captured in the Search text box?

I think OSM(f) could create a Kaggle Competition to ask the community of data scientists to help us with that.

Analyzing this could give many insights into how the communities should drive their efforts.

Not that I know of (obvious hen and egg issue that you could only have that if you had a method to anonymize the inputs).

The way to move forward would be for a interested data analyst to sign a NDA with the OSMF after agreement has been reached with the relevant working groups (LWG, EWG and OWG) and then get access to the raw data for developing a solution.

1 Like