Hacker News Reader

Comment by alufers | Hacker News Reader

OSM is so good that even the fire fighters use it in Poland for navigation and finding fire hydrants. The funny thing is that if you modify or add a fire hydrant a guy from the emergency services asks to send a picture of it before he approves the change.

View on HN

To clarify: they maintain(ed) own reviewed replica of OSM data and asked about suspicious edits.

Any edits in OSM go live immediately without review.

I feel like this is where there could be some improvements. It would be quite nice to allow a review process to be setup for some types of edits. Plenty of examples in the market to get inspiration from.

In many areas there is zero or just one local mapper.

And vandalism and malicious editing remains rare.

That would be enormous effort for minimal benefit.

That is fine when the scale for OSM is intentionally small. But if larger companies want to use OSM as a base for their mapping solution while contributing changes upstream, it will be helpful to have that infrastructure setup for merging in changes without issue.

Edit: I am not suggesting the existing OSM community build this, if companies want to do this they will put in the effort.

That's amazing! I know that lots of local and regional governments are trending towards using OSM as their source of truth for data about their area, but hadn't heard that particular story. Love it!

How does that work? Does OSM verify who emergency services employees are? Or is the item owned by an account of an employee of the emergency services?

It seems like this data should be coming directly from some government database.

To clarify: they maintain(ed) own reviewed replica of OSM data and asked about suspicious edits.

Any edits in OSM go live immediately without review.

And Poland has no government database of hydrants or AED.

In fact Polish community is right now working on making decent AED database - with https://aed.openstreetmap.org.pl/ created recently that shows already collected data

How is this not done by the installer? Seems like a problem that didn’t need crowd sourcing.

That would make sense but at least some companies that maintain hydrants are also using OSM data.

Some things happened before OSM existed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com