File talk:OSMToolsDecisionTree.png

Why it is not mentioning Overpass Turbo and taginfo for basic statistics? This may be preferable to Ohsome Mateusz Konieczny (talk) 16:50, 19 January 2021 (UTC)

Well, of course this whole diagram is quite opinionated (see the logos at the top ;) ), so if there are two or more tools which can be used to get a specific question answered equally well, we opted for our "in-house" solutions. But that is also the purpose of the whole thing – it is on purpose not a complete list with a gazillion options, like you find so often in the OSM wiki. Our idea was to provide a helping guideline for people which have no clue where to start. Providing multiple solutions for a single task would be confusing, IMHO.

That said, I would argue that Overpass is quite a bit less powerful for simple statistics, as it basically only allows to count objects directly. For everything else (e.g. calculating road lengths, landuse areas, etc.) you would need to use additional software like QGIS or write a python script or what not. Also, some of the more "advanced" basic calculations are quite a bit less intuitive to code in Overpass compared to the ohsome API.

For taginfo, it is a similar different argument: You only get counts, and you can't even chose the area you are interested in. Sure, taginfo gives you more detailed statistics about the individual tags, but that was not really something we considered as "basic statistics".

-- Tyr (talk) 14:48, 21 January 2021 (UTC)

Why it recommends OSM Api for anything except editing? And for editing OSM APi can be used also on large scale... Mateusz Konieczny (talk) 16:52, 19 January 2021 (UTC)

There is a disclaimer on the flowchart that one should only use the OSM API if one really needs live data or access to single elements. What we had in mind were tools like Is OSM up-to-date, - OSM Deep History, or even OSM's own export tab which do rely on the OSM API but are not directly map-editing related.

Reading up on the OSM API usage policy, I think that what we propose in this graph should be acceptable since we don't encourage large or frequent data usage. On the other hand, it would also be OK to omit this specific option, since it is kind of questionable, and the Overpass API is also fine for small scale data extraction. I will update the graph on File:OSMToolsDecisionTree.png.

-- Tyr (talk) 14:48, 21 January 2021 (UTC)