That's not how I would summarize it. OSM is only giving them two options: apply to be treated as an automated sync source, or don't submit at all. They're willing to put in work and care but not to handle all the other complex barriers.
No, and this is the issue I have with his write up. Yes all points listed are correct. But do they apply in the same rigor and depth for all imports, likely no.
There is a difference between a tiger import or local government address data for thousands of buildings VS a few thousand street libraries. The community review process should/would consider this.
I would also guess that it took some time to investigate all of the requirements and write it down. Might as well have written an import plan and discussed it :-)
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 :)
I appreciate OSM for maintaining a higher data quality bar than other projects (Overture places are mostly junk outside of USA), but it's also just artificially limiting itself by not allowing streamlined paths to data contributions.
It is streamlined for individuals, and I have no interest in it being streamlined for anything else.
I'd rather no data than bad data. There is no seperate baby & bath water. If a bulk source of data contains an unknown mix of good and bad data, that is all one big single item of bad data that is of no use to anyone.
Also I don't get the point why you would want them easily scrapeable to begin with.
If you have eyes to read and can walk across YOUR neighborhoods, you would have eventually seen one. I thought that was the whole point? They are not exactly hidden.
I find those public bookcase incidental low barrier offerings to a reading exprience you just stumble upon, nothing you would seek out on a map.
Why would you want to have more people from anywhere else possibly raid them for anything useful?
This way nobody is inclined to put anything worthwhile in there if it just ends up outside of their communities. Not that I'm in general pessimistic, just would like to know what is gained by putting the exact location into a map and not just have a list of neigborhoods with a book corner and optional photo on that neigborhood level, if people want to network around them.
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.
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.
Are you describing what Mapillary is doing ? It's a crowdsourced street level imagery provider (owned by Facebook since 2020, but still contributing to OSM), but they do auto-detection of feature (you can see that in the online OSM editor: Map Data > Photo Overlays > Mapillary > Map Features).
I vaguely remember a blog post about doing photogrammetry out of their images, but I'm not entirely sure about it.
OpenStreetMap is a 2D map with limited 3D features, not a streetview alternative. For crowdsourced street view there are services like Mapillary (now owned by Meta) and Panoramax, both of which are cleared for use in mapping in OSM (and in case of Panoramax which is self-hostable, often run by a local OSM community).
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.
I feel like having such a map at all is kind of antithetical to building community. Shows you don't care enough to take a stroll in your 'hood to find such a one by happenstance (or to find neighbors to populate yours) and are hunting them down to share your self-published slop or something. Besides, it makes things a hell of a lot easier for griefers and trolls.
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.
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 written it, before coming to this realization and hiding it again). But doing it is a trap.
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) :)
This one sends data straight to OSM. I don't have my own database to "moderate", pictures are saved into a Panoramax-instance.
As users authenticate by logging in with OSM, the boring, risky legal stuff is handled by OpenStreetMap. Uploading images has a small print that says that their images will be reshared under CC-BY-SA.
The part where I suck is in creating a nice, polished website with extra pages, SEO, ...
Maybe an alternate process could use streetcomplete? Make the imported data available in streetcomplete for validation, then include it only after x validations?
Is there a path forward to writing a guide for how users can contribute back to OSM if they wish? A "thank you for your contribution, if you wish to learn more about OSM and how our maps are built click here" => go to a blog post which describes the relationship with OSM, why Book Corners can't be liable for contributing data back to OSM, and how a user could do that if they wanted.
29 comments
[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 52.2 ms ] threadA project like OSM would be bombarded with spam and junk submissions if it didn’t have these barriers to submission. Understandable.
> Contact the relevant local communities affected by the contributions
Do I literally have to do new local community outreach every little town one of my bookcases shows up in? Ridiculous if so
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 :)
I'd rather no data than bad data. There is no seperate baby & bath water. If a bulk source of data contains an unknown mix of good and bad data, that is all one big single item of bad data that is of no use to anyone.
Yes, you'll always need a user account
Why would you want to have more people from anywhere else possibly raid them for anything useful? This way nobody is inclined to put anything worthwhile in there if it just ends up outside of their communities. Not that I'm in general pessimistic, just would like to know what is gained by putting the exact location into a map and not just have a list of neigborhoods with a book corner and optional photo on that neigborhood level, if people want to network around them.
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.
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.
I vaguely remember a blog post about doing photogrammetry out of their images, but I'm not entirely sure about it.
They're already covering the blurring, as well as detecting useful objects in imagery (traffic signs for a start).
Getting an official "charter sign" will cost you 50 bucks.
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.
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 written it, before coming to this realization and hiding it again). But doing it is a trap.
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
This one sends data straight to OSM. I don't have my own database to "moderate", pictures are saved into a Panoramax-instance.
As users authenticate by logging in with OSM, the boring, risky legal stuff is handled by OpenStreetMap. Uploading images has a small print that says that their images will be reshared under CC-BY-SA.
The part where I suck is in creating a nice, polished website with extra pages, SEO, ...