[y4mi]

I sometimes wish companies were required to report their opening hours when registering and the state made this information available through a public api.

It's not really possible as not all place have scheduled opening and closing times... But a dude can dream, right?

[moring]

Just a thought... opening hours can usually be scraped from their website (totally unfounded guess: that's how Google does it), so what seems to be missing here is a free tool -- and probably a free central database of pre-scraped data -- to collect this information for others to use together with OSM data. The process will be a bit different from OSM because data is scraped, not edited.

Edit: To add, if such a tool needs site-specific configuration to work, then that configuration could again be community-edited in a style similar to OSM data.

[y4mi]

> totally unfounded guess: that's how Google does it

I'm pretty sure Google doesn't do that. At least not as the primary information source.

I don't work for Google, so I could be mistaken, but I've provided several information updates before. Google gave me the "local guide" after my first accepted update and gave me gamified incentives to update and verify local information about businesses afterwards until I disabled them again. (Like notifications when I'm at a store to verify if there is a parking lot and things regarding to disabilities etc).

The questions are usually really innocuous and quick to answer, which pretty much makes the player into free labor for Google, one minute at a time.

I was required to provide some proof on some information like opening times and that's probably how they're linking back to the official website. But it happens through user input not automated scraping i believe.