[NewsyHacker]

In my OSM career, bike-traveling the world, I have added POIs in all kinds of unlikely places in the developing world. But a real challenge is adding more than just the indication that there is, for example, a shop there. It’s hard to add a name= tag when the shop has not hung up a sign with a name. It’s hard to add an opening_hours= tag when the shop has not posted opening hours, and even if I ask the owners, they might say hours are totally fuzzy. Such clear information is largely a feature of the developed world.

In some parts of urban Latin America, the challenge in adding POIs is that it is ill-advised to slowly, aimlessly walk down the street with your phone, because it could get snatched.

[Reason077]

> “It’s hard to add a name= tag when the shop has not hung up a sign with a name. It’s hard to add an opening_hours= tag when the shop has not posted opening hours”

Even Google Maps has this problem. There’s a lot of “great noodle shop second on left” type business names in some parts of the world. Owners often live above/behind/in the shop/restaurant and they open more or less on demand. Hours will change seasonally - if there’s customers they’re open and if there isn’t they close.

The real trick with POI data is not just the data itself but the metadata that tells you how important it is. If you know how many people are searching for a place, visiting a place, reviewing it etc then you can boost its prominence in map rendering and search results, greatly improving UX.

An ideal solution would be for all the travel, mapping apps, etc that compete against Google (TripAdvisor, Yelp, Apple Maps, Facebook, all the in-car apps, etc) to share some kind of global OpenPOI database on top of OSM that aggregates reviews, photos, metadata, etc. And also gives owners a single source of truth to update their business data, keep it updated in real time, and have it disseminated everywhere…