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

AngocA · 2023-01-01T20:46:49.723Z

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.

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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.

WarpathPeacock · 2023-01-01T22:58:31.503Z

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.

SimonPoole · 2023-01-02T10:32:14.971Z

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.

AngocA · 2023-01-05T03:08:39.383Z

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.

SimonPoole · 2023-01-05T09:02:03.883Z

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.