For more detailed context and reasoning behind this topic, please see this OSM Diary.
Summary
For the past 8 years HOT has been supporting the hosting and maintenance of OSM Analytics. At HOT, our Tech & Data team’s current focus is on facilitating mapping activity with our tools and enabling everyone in our focus regions to map, with a mission to map areas home to 1 billion people.. With these priorities in mind, we have been working on two alternatives to OSM Analytics to meet HOTs needs.
We have partnered with HeiGIT to really understand the contributions to the map and analyze the data being created by humanitarian mappers. The ohsome dashboard provides statistics on map data currentness and saturation, but it was not expressly built to replace OSM Analytics. HeiGIT has also produced the ohsome History Explorer (ohsome Hex) to explore edits on OSM.
Secondly, we are building a data processing engine called Underpass, which is just now entering the prototyping stage where data can be analyzed at scale. From HOT’s perspective the APIs available from HeiGIT and Underpass will have a greater scope of analysis, higher accuracy, and flexible use-case to provide as a service to the OSM community.
As such, we have decided to discontinue the OSM Analytics service. We realize that leaves a gap for some users, so we would like to hear from you:
- What do you currently use OSM Analytics for?
- What is missing in the available tools for OSM data analysis in the OSM ecosystem?
Please share your views by responding to this thread by Monday 18 December. We will then review the feedback and see how we can incorporate your user needs into our project priorities in the new year. Also, if you are interested in supporting OSM Analytics by hosting the QA Tiles and processing service, please reach out at tech@hotosm.org.