Why Book Corners won't sync contributions back to OpenStreetMap
Book Corners, a service for discovering and sharing little free libraries, initially planned to let users contribute new libraries back to OpenStreetMap. But after researching OSM's import and automated edit guidelines, the author realized the operational burden—documentation, community review, licensing, and ongoing support—far outweighs the benefit for a small project. So he's indefinitely suspending the write-back feature, choosing to focus on core improvements instead.
Sometimes the right feature is no feature.
- jasonkester
I run a website that's in a similar situation, and it sounds like the author is close to the correct solution, but needs to take things one step further:
There needs to be a Single Point of Truth, and it should not be your little website.
BigCentralThing should be the official database that knows about where all the Whatevers are. Your little Whatever Locator site should only ever _pull_ from them. Need a new Whatever in the database? Get BigCentralThing to add it, then pull it in.
As an example, I run https://bettybeta.com/, a select guide to bouldering in Fontainebleau tailored for Women and short folk. We have a list of boulder problems in our database, but no way for anybody (even an admin) to add a new one. Every boulder problem record includes a link to its page at https://bleau.info/, who are dedicated to cataloging every climb in the forest.
Bleau.info is the Single Point of Truth. If one of our users does a First Ascent and wants to log it with us, we'll point them at that other site with instructions on how to get their climb in there, and tell them how to get us to import it. Any other path would lead to our database and the "official" database eventually diverging.
There are half a dozen other websites doing similar things to us. Some do what we do, but the ones that don't quickly find themselves out of sync and end up with a lot more work on their hands.
It's tough because, as the author says, writing the flow to import at our end is really easy (I've wri […]
- Aurornis
In summary: Because OSM requires work and care to be put into the data submission plan, which isn’t worth it.
A project like OSM would be bombarded with spam and junk submissions if it didn’t have these barriers to submission. Understandable.
- ryukoposting
To be clear to folks not familiar with OSM:
These restrictions are unique to projects doing automated submissions of mass data.
If you're an individual just trying to make the world a better place, you can make an OSM account, go to the website, click, add a thing, hit submit, done. Someone will review it.
Apps like CoMaps and Organic Maps make it super easy to contribute data for businesses, landmarks, and such.
- andreagrandi
Hello folks, author of Book Corners here. I just made the whole libraries db available for download (it's OBDL licensed).
It's available from every users dashboard (it's a ~2 MB compressed GeoJSON file). It includes both libraries orignally imported from OSM and additional libraries added by users.
While I still think the whole OSM process to submit back is a bit too much for the time I have available (but I still understand and respect), at least I want to give users an additional option to retrieve the data (in addition to the public API).
If you have any other advices, I will be glad to hear them and, compatibly with my spare time, I will try to implement them (if they make sense and are useful for users) :)
Thanks
- florkbork
This is trivial to navigate.
Use the notes API to post the likely presence of a public bookcase with details (link to image, description, etc); and the community will slowly ingest the contributions.
Or set up a maproulette challenge with much the same detail.
Or just a geojson dump under an ODBL licence and share with with relevant communities. The third one or something very like it is required if you have mixed ODBL with non ODBL content.
- arjie
This makes sense, but I wish there was a generally accepted way to share geospatial data and POI data against OSM IDs. e.g. I want to be able to add overlays for noise level, etc. and I find the whole thing too fragmented. The OSM way seems to be the right way, but no one seems to do it. You just maintain your own DB with an optional OSM POI entity identifier etc.
I suppose if you want something badly enough you have to do it yourself, but it's not that the thing doesn't exist though it doesn't seem to. It's that I want others to want it too :)
- childofhedgehog
I think the piece I’m confused most about is why the little free library website’s map isn’t the place to log little free libraries.
That being said, it makes sense that OSM has guidelines like this in place to ensure the data quality stays, well, quality.
- DoctorOetker
I've always been confused why OSM doesn't design a cheap open source stereo imager, some finetuned modern YOLO neural network could detect and blur the glass parts of windows, doorbells, nameplates and humans in the scene.
It could use GPS for rough geolocation, and 3D models of all the scenery could be generated. New contribution traces would contain changes compared to the past. Volunteers could request new paths it would like to see explored, and OSM could propose paths that cut through or ride along segments of recently submitted recordings of other users, to check if those changes are real, without checking the whole suspected recording.
Separate ground truth recording from its interpretation into mappable concepts, going out to make a recording or observation is a different task from deciding how to canonicalize the content.