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Comment by sampton | Hacker News Reader

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

OSM has the notes feature which sounds like what OP should have used

> Example of a valid and useful note can be "a new road was constructed here" or "this shop is closed and does not exist anymore".

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Notes

Mapy.com does this and I often see and resolve these notes on streetcomplete. It's nice setup, they provide a suggestion and location, it takes little effort to check if you are walking by and just reply to the note. Some enthusiastic editor (can be you back home, but it's annoying to do on a phone screen) then can make the edit and resolve the note.

Yes, the data source is clearly useful, so not having it is a loss. But an edit is large enough a privilege to require all these checks.

Perhaps it's not that OSM that needs a signal, but perhaps it's that there's an opportunity for an open map that has many signals, of which OSM and Book Corners are examples.

Laying your own datasets on top of OSM is probably the most common use case. OSM isn't much of a replacement to Google and Apple maps as it is a way to build your own custom maps.

This can probably be added to the toolchain pretty easily when non-OSM "signals" are converted to OSM format first. All you need then is an OSM data merging tool, all other tools will then get the same data format as before.

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