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jesperlang | 1 year ago

OSM has the potential to be the open, available source of truth for so much of our data. From there, we can simply build curated UIs that displays what we need (keep in mind that OSM is not a “map”). Opening hours for example. Today this info is either on a webpage or google maps. Sometimes contradicting each other, where a Facebook status update has the most accurate info.

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hk__2|1 year ago

Unfortunately OSM doesn’t solve the problem if the POI owners don’t use it; and in my experience they often don’t even know it exists. Even in my densely-populated area with tons of OSM contributors a lot of POIs are still outdated because restaurant and store owners care only about their website/Instagram/FB or Google Maps and don’t know about OSM. When I started contributing ~12 years ago a main contributor used to say it was a waste of time to map restaurants because the data quickly becomes outdated if nobody’s there to check; I don’t know if he still thinks the same.

globular-toast|1 year ago

This will be massively controversial I'm sure, but I'm starting to think it should be illegal for companies to get the (unpaid) public to contribute to their own private database. Those store owners don't want to make the data available to Google, they want to make it available to the public. Companies like Google are abusing the public to further their own goals at the detriment to us all. Pay someone to do it? Fine. It's yours. Get it from the public? Then it's public data and you have to make it available to the public.

bdjsiqoocwk|1 year ago

> used to say it was a waste of time to map restaurants because the data quickly becomes outdated

I downloaded streetcomplete on the suggestion of someone else on this thread, and that was immediately my intuition.