Why Book Corners won't sync contributions back to OpenStreetMap

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.

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.

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.

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 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'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.

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.

You could try pinging an OSM dev to see if they're willing to take over the work laterally before calling it quits

OSM needs a way to ingest "signals" instead of edits.

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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.