Curious about a new place? Get there via OpenStreetMaps API a talk by Vojta Filipec
Saturday, 15 June, 15:40 in Club
For many companies, getting known a location where customers live or work is important as it helps to understand the customers better.
Knowledge of the neighborhoods may identify deficient services to a marketing company: Would you offer an online librarian service to someone who lives next to a public library?; it may also approximate the wealth of the customer: Are there villas or block-of-flats nearby?; an urban development initiative can use it to rigorously compare civil services across multiple districts.
Finally it enables you to address your spouse's inquiry: On our day-trip, is there any Thai restaurant which opens on Sundays and has a children playground within a 200 m radius?
To answer the above questions you need a rich source of data with decent API. OpenStreetMaps offer both. This talk explains how to access the data points in OSM and how to query their labels and content. It will introduce two Python libraries (overpass and overpy) and the underlying OSM query language, which jointly allow you to search and extract whatever information you might be interested in.
Vojta Filipec
Since my graduation in physics, I spent a dozen years doing data science. My professional experience covers both quantitative work (developing models and mining data) and a load of soft-skills (being an internal consultant in a pharma company).
My personal experience nowadays focuses very much on the upbringing of the next generation. For the sake of job and family, I work a lot with maps and I find them an easily accessible yet rich source of information.
