AI for Spatial Data Search

Aino claims to be 'the world’s first AI tool tailored specifically for retrieving and analyzing spatial data'. In essence, Aino is an AI-powered platform that allows you to search and (supposedly) download spatial data from over 10,000 datasets across more than 400 cities, covering points of interest (POI), urban infrastructure, social data, and much more.

How Easy is Aino to Use?

I found Aino fairly intuitive. In the free trial, you only get 10 queries, so I wasn’t able to explore Aino’s capabilities for very long. However, during my limited trial, I was able to define an area on the map and add various local points of interest, road linestrings, and building footprints within the search area.

Aino stands out for its use of natural language queries. Compared to Overpass Turbo, searching for spatial data with Aino is far more intuitive, as it doesn’t require knowledge of Overpass' complex query language. However, during my brief trial, I couldn’t test more advanced and complex spatial queries—an area where Overpass truly excels.

Can You Download the Data?

Aino includes a "Download and Share" button, which reportedly allows you to download your data as a GeoJSON or CSV file. However, no matter how many times I attempted to download my data as GeoJSON, I failed. This may well be user error, but whenever I asked Aino to show me data within a polygon area, all I could download was the polygon itself - not the actual data. Even when selecting "Export only visible layers" and hiding the polygon, Aino would still only export the hidden polygon instead of the visible data layers I wanted.

I may be missing something simple, but without the ability to download the data you’ve searched for, there isn’t much point in using Aino. It might be that Aino just needs to update their help guide on How to export the project in JSON to explain how to export spatial data from the map and not just the defining search polygons.