When we took Finder! out of private beta July 2nd, Matt Constantine also added a tool for doing statistical analysis of data downloads. We’ve been running it for 21 days and thought we’d share a little bit of what we’ve learned with the community.

1) Users love to download and have done so 18,143 times, but are a bit less excited about uploading, only 775 times (roughly 4% contribution rate which really is not all that bad when it comes to web participation).

2) When it comes to downloading KML dominates:

3) When it comes to uploading Shapefile dominates:

4) Quite a few people look at metadata (5,164 views) but prefer FGDC to ISO 19115:

The stats draw some stark yet relatively obvious conclusions. A good percentage of the data users are interested in seeing, natively resides in GIS file formats, shapefile specifically, but users much prefer consuming this data in GeoWeb formats, specifically KML. This is probably not a surprise to anyone, but for those in the GIS industry this could serve as a meaningful number for how the market wants to consume data.

Also I think the metadata statistics could serve as an indicator that the broad market does have an interest in metadata and understanding the veracity and accuracy of data they consume. This has been a topic the GIS side has been quiet vociferous about and increasingly looks to be something the GeoWeb will need to address.

A second bit of trivia is the top ten most popular data sets by download:

1. STARBUCKS, Store closures in the lower 48 states, USA, 2008
2. Priceviewer.com, WalMart Store Locations, USA, 2007
3. bicycleshops.us , Bike Shops by address, USA, 2008
4. WITS, Shia Violence in Iraq, Iraq, 2004 - March 2007
5. CARMA, United States Power Plant Emissions, United States, 2000/2007/Future
6. HRSA, Critical Access Hospitals in the lower 48 states, USA, 2007
7. Census, State Government Tax Collections, USA, 2007
8. CDC, Outbreak of Salmonella Saintpaul from Tomatoes Update, USA by State or County, June 14th 2008
9. 500 Year Flood Plain - Johnson County, Iowa
10. Openstreetmap Geofabrik, German Subway System,Germany , 2008

Popularity: 14% [?]