Dear DACDTC,

I am afraid I will have to remove your contributions from OpenStreetMap again. They are clearly made for SEO purposes and without the diligence that we would require from any contributor, but certainly from a commercial player.

You have been made aware of some of the issues by other community members but you have continued to make edits unchanged.

The problems with your edits include:

• The commercial POIs you are adding to not follow the standard tagging scheme in OSM. Most notably, they do not have a correct shop/amenity/office or similar tag that would identify the POI. Some have tags like “amenity=amenity|ice_cream” but that is not recognized. You have to research the proper tagging for POIs you wish to add.
• The URLs you have been specifying were often formatted wrongly. Also, they did sometimes contain advertising trackers (“?utm_source=OSMA&utm_medium=local&utm_campaign=openstreetmap-local”) which we do not tolerate.
• You often added POIs where the same POI was already in OSM. You need to “conflate” your data with existing information instead. (Examples, osm.org/node/7009896296 or osm.org/node/6997410785).
• A random sample of your edits has shown occasional wacky tagging like an alt_name tag with a value identical to the name tag.
• You have not specified changeset comments, and neither do you have an user profile text that would explain who you are and why you are doing this.
• You have not specified the source of your additions, but I have compared a random sample of your contributions and found that the locations were 100% identical with what you get from Google when you geocode the given address. This infringes on Google’s copyright; you cannot add data to OSM that was geocoded with Google.

Some of your information is valuable to OpenStreetMap and we would be happy to have it, but you have to sort out these issues before the data can be accepted.

Perhaps it would make sense to discuss your plans with the US/Canadian OSM community, for example on one of the mailing lists (lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us or -ca), or on their Slack channel.

Best regards
Frederik Ramm
OSMF Data Working Group
Ticket#2019112610000181