@futzle Somebody else mapped my dwelling in #OpenStreetMap 😢

When I decide to move, my priority will definitely be to find the area where my new dwelling is NOT mapped in OpenStreetMap.

That way, I'll have a plenty of fun mapping out my new undermapped neighborhood in all the details with #JOSM, #Vespucci and #StreetComplete / #SCEE 😄

@uneabeille That's something I'd love to do too!

I just struggle with the following specifically:

First of all, POIs are simple enough to work with for me. A POI is a single point on a map with a type and properties defined by their type. I can easily add or edit them using #CoMaps, #StreetComplete or, if I'm feeling particularly brave, even #Vespucci.

But buildings, paths and such I don't get yet. I don't really understand boundaries, relations, nodes, polygons, vectors, whatever. That's why I'm not confident enough to make non-trivial contributions.

For example, how do we canonically actually handle businesses? Is a business a POI placed on top of its building polygon on the map? Is the POI supposed to be placed in the middle of the building, or where the entrance is?

Where should information about the business go, as in, name, contact info, opening hours and such? Is the building polygon itself supposed to be tagged as, say, a restaurant? Is a POI on top of the building supposed to hold all the business information? How do we connect the POI to the building it is inside of, data-wise?

I mean, I can always look into the wiki to read the documentation. But usually, the actual implentation of my area's mapping is completely different from the documented way to do it. We have buildings tagged as restaurants, POIs slapped on top of buildings.

Therefore, there's a lot of wrong or missing data basically everywhere here.

Deprecated properties and tags, misused property values, missing or partial data, wrong data, imprecise data. Standards naturally evolve way faster than map data does.

It's so much that it sometimes feels a little pointless to clean up my local area.

Does it really matter to anyone at all if I spend weeks making sure that my neighbourhood's buildings are all correctly tagged with type, height and roof colour? That every single garden appears on OSM, even when no other garden is actually mapped in my entire city, and even some major public parks are mistagged, no bicycle lanes are mapped, and nearly no road has a surface property?

Do I really tangibly help out a single cyclist when I spend a whole day tagging cycle paths and cycle path types, surfaces and widths, when no navigation app actually makes use of any of that data, and the rest of my city is untagged?

In the end, I always arrive at the same somewhat depressing conclusion: all the data in the world is only useful if someone's making use of it.

No matter how meticulously we micro-map every detail of pedestrian infrastructure, there is no navigation app that lets us navigate to the closest bench with a backrest.

Or that navigates me only through wide, well-lit bicycle paths. Or that actually does anything with the type or location of trees in our local park.

That's the demotivating part of #OpenStreetMap for me. All that detailed data, but no practical application to make it useful. I don't feel like I'm making a difference.

It's kind of like rewriting your website to consist solely of perfect, semantic HTML. Tagging every date with <time>, every <address>, every <abbr>eviation. It's machine readable in theory, but since no browser does anything with all that data, it's completely useless.