I often use apps using OSM data to find nearby restaurants to go to. However I noticed that most restaurants in my area do not have cuisine information, and many that do have typos or other non-standard values that can’t be processed by the apps I use. This makes it harder to find a place to eat. So I cleaned up all the cuisines in my country to improve the usability of the data that is already there.

Using JOSM I was able to do this at scale. I would do it for more places but it requires some knowledge of local cuisines. I left instructions at the bottom of this post so you can do it for your area if you like.

Process

First I researched all the existing uses (mostly using taginfo) and updated the Key:cuisine wiki to reflect current usage. With a clearer picture of what tags are in use and which are duplicates, I felt confident in sorting through thousands of tags and determining which ones had issues that needed to be fixed.

JOSM allows me to easily download and filter objects. The Tag Editor plugin allows me to easily edit a large list of objects. With these tools I was able to focus on making edits and not on repetitive tasks or on sorting through objects I don’t need to see. The exact steps and filters I used are below.

I want to be clear that I’m specifically trying to avoid making decisions about which tags should or should not be used, and I’m not making any decisions about what cuisines a restaurant serves. I’m merely matching the original mapper’s intent with current tagging standards. Mostly this means fixing typos and syntax, and occasionally moving the information to a different tag.

Examples

… See full entry