How to use Open Data for Business Insights

In this walkthrough, I will use OpenStreetMap data from BigQuery. It’s great that Google published it for free in their public data sets. So you can easily query geo information with SQL [1]. Google uploaded their data set once without any updates yet. If you need newer data, then the OpenStreetMap API in combination with some simple python code might be a possible solution for your problem.

Use Cases for OpenStreetMap

OpenStreetMap.org is an international project founded in 2004 with the goal of creating a free map of the world. For this purpose we collect data about roads, railroads, rivers, forests, houses and much more worldwide [2].

Although the data from OpenStreetMap is free, but you can well draw certain business advantages. Some examples that I have helped to develop or at least accompanied are for example:

• Geo analysis (Where are my customers located?)
• Market analysis (Where do my competitors have stores?)
• Tour optimization (How can I optimize logistics routes?)
• Fraud detection (Are the invoices for transport justified?)
• and many more

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