this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2024
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Beside what @[email protected] wrote, maptiler and other map providers started to display osm with overture maps.
Overture maps is started by corporations to present their gibberish data to their shareholders. It's mostly AI generated building footprints with varying quality and location of pages and businesses from facebook.
The corporate sponsors of osm couldn't add this data to osm, because it's against our rules. The license of overture maps is compatible with osm, so you copy from there freely, you can use it as a source, and it's legal for providers like maptiler to mix them.
The problem with overture is it's quality is not checked, while it's datarich, you can't be sure if it's true at all. Looks nice, but not more usable.
Couldnt you use it a source and then ask people who live near it if the data is accurate? That way you wouldnt need to manually add stuff to the map and you could still help osm.
That's a good usecase, but finding something based on incomplete or wrong data is harder than just surveying what's on the ground.
If you look for something and you find it, it's good and easy, you just copy it to osm. But what if you can't find it? If it's not on the ground you can't be sure why and what to do next:
The problem is you cannot really edit the source of overture. You cannot ask fb to delete someone else's page because it's out of business, or update its address. You cannot tag it as invalid, because currently we have only read only access to overture, you cannot contribute data there.
But overture is relatively new, and I hope the tools will get better, and maybe it will be a bit more usable for the wider community in the future.
I did similar things on osm, tried to find unnamed hostels made by anonymous maps.me users, it's awfully hard to find something when your only info is it's a hostel, and it should be somewhere in this neighborhood. Because you can only delete the wrong hostel if you checked all the surrounding buildings if there isn't an untagged hostel hidden somewhere.
And if you can ask people who live near, why not ask them to simply add the POI? We don't need overture for that, and it's about the same amount of work, and it's much more fun. There are genial and easy to use tools for adding new places to osm aimed at casual mappers: StreetComplete, Every Door, OnOsm.org just to name a few.
You forgot https://mapcomplete.org in your list!
Interesting! This makes a lot of sense.