After I came across some business descriptions in OSM that were of dubious quality, I decided to hunt them down systematically. OSM is, after all, not a place for advertisements. Now, about half a year and hundreds of POI tag fixes later, it is time to reflect on this project and to share my observations.

Introduction

People who map their business on OSM usually have a single changeset in which they put their business on their map. They often foul up the opening hours sysntax and international formatting for phone numbers, and there is usually a lot of info still missing. This is fine, since OSM data in general follows the trend where basic map data receives details, corrections and improvements by different mappers over time.

An issue arises when companies try to sneak in their brochure texts and other SEO spam. We want OSM to stay objective and neutral and we want data that relates to the real world, so this information is unwelcome. We can’t stop people from mapping their company details, but moderation is clearly needed if we are to uphold these principles.

I started looking for a way to detect the unwanted spam. The result is this Overpass query for buzzwords in the description tag. Think about words like “award winning”, “reliable service” and “conveniently located”. This is a dynamic process, because I regularly add new buzzwords that I encounter alongside the ones that I find through the query and I remove words that result in false positives.

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Today has been my first day of contributing to OSM. My hometown is still as good as empty, so I have a lot of work to do. I already added several POIs (mainly shops) and put some roads where they’re supposed to be. I have a lot to learn, but I already got a lot of help to get started. My goal is to rival Google Maps in completeness in about a 1 km radius from where I live.