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Do you want to find a or friendly place to eat at your location?

is the best tool for the job!

openvegemap.netlib.re

The UI is not perfect, but it takes the data straight from , so it's always updated and easy to update if you find something wrong.

I had a look at some restaurants already in OSM and checked the menu on their website. If they have veggie main course(s) I added that to OSM, and instantly they where available on OpenVegeMap.

There's an app for finding these places in Norway, with a much better UI/UX. Unfortunately the dev is dead set against extracting and adding places from/to OpenStreetMap.

= This otherwise great app is only usable in Norway, and even here the usability is only so-so. They have a volunteer team to find and update places, but instead of being a part of a huge team anyone can join (OSM) and help each other, they have to find and keeps everything to themselves. No mutual help = worse for everyone.

There's also this awesome website here in Norway to show you all kinds of cool, free stuff in the city on a map, like playgrounds, sports and training facilities, community grills, public toilets, etc.

But again the map does not extract these places from OSM, where people has already spent time and energy adding them, and don't give new places added to OSM either. So the map is worse than it could be, OSM is worse than it could be, and everyone needs to do the same work twice or more.

The most infuriating thing is that both of these examples of fantastic tools to help people find things on maps actually uses as their background map layer that they show the points of interest on top of. You can even see the things in the map that's registered in OSM, but not in the data points on top of the map!

See this example of a registered playground and an unregistered one.

Instead of just using the data already there, they make people do extra work, for a worse outcome.

It seems to me that @openstreetmap should look into making better documentation on how to make a website or app that extracts data points from , (and makes it possible for users of that third party service to add new data to OSM without individual OSM accounts, preferably).

I have not checked the quality of such documentation myself. I'm no developer. But if it's already good, then maybe more should be done to get the word out? There's a huge, wasted potential here it seems to me.

@forteller @openstreetmap "and makes it possible for users of that third party service to add new data to OSM without individual OSM accounts, preferably"

It's probably possible (i think bing maps is doing this) but I think it is actually *not* wanted by OSM. If a user makes wrong/questionable edits (on purpose or by accident, e.g. because of lack of knowledge), it is helpful/necessary to contact them (e.g., via messages on OSM). Thats not possible without accounts.

Børge

@BafDyce @openstreetmap Yes, you're right. And that's a logical policy. But there are other ways. Like the user of the third party tool could send in the info to that tool, and they could review the info before sending it in from their OSM account. This might not need any special API calls or anything, but the OSM documentation could mention this option and explain a bit about how to do it.