Tl;dr: this is a somewhat technical post, so if you are interested primarily in finding alternatives to OSM Analytics, please scroll down to the last section. This post is being created in conjunction with a Community Forum topic as well, so any feedback or comments should be directed there.

Background

What is OSM Analytics?

For the past 8 years HOT has been supporting the hosting and maintenance of OSM Analytics. This service was built by Martin Raifer, hired by HOT with support by the Knight Foundation. It was originally developed to help people analyze and visualize OSM data it multiple ways:

• Density and distribution of OSM features such as buildings, roads, hospitals, amenities, places and waterways from aggregated low zoom levels (world scale) all the way to individual features;
• Total count of OSM features over different areas, including any admin boundary, user defined area of interest or custom GeoJSON;
• Recency of edits displayed in a timeline graph, allowing users to select specific time periods and visualize the corresponding edits on the map
• Visual distribution of features mapped by OSM contributors with different levels of experience, allowing interactive selection of experience levels and automatically displaying relevant features
• Gap analysis, showing areas of estimated completeness with regards to buildings mapped;
• Change over time, allowing users to compare density, distribution and total count of OSM features in any area at any zoom levels, between any two years from 2007 to now
• Top OSM contributors and top distinct tags for any user defined areas, allowing interactive filtering through the timeline slider selector

Technical functionality

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