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by blendergeek 1020 days ago
> They have an actual human put actual minutes into speaking with every single business in their database. Think how much that alone must cost.

They may have done this in years past. I have worked in fast food for the last decades and I get Google's calls. They are all automated and the robot on the other end never understands me because the hours of the places I manage aren't simple enough to explain to Google's AI.

Of course OSM can't be updated with up-to-the-minute opening hours at all.
2 comments
lode 1019 days ago
> Of course OSM can't be updated with up-to-the-minute opening hours at all.

Of course it can. I regularly add opening hours of businesses I frequent on OSM, including special cases like public holidays.

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blendergeek 1019 days ago
But nothing on OSM is "up-to-the-minute". Many OSM data consumers are months behind OSM discourages putting anything temporary on the map. While I do add OSM business hours including public holidays a lot, this isn't always possible when businesses don't have pre-planned holiday schedules.
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franga2000 1020 days ago
> Of course OSM can't be updated with up-to-the-minute opening hours at all.

What do you mean by this? The spec seems to allow it https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:opening_hours/specif...

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blendergeek 1019 days ago
The spec is very detailed and allows a lot of granularity. Unfortunately, real businesses often don't have set holiday schedules but rather play it by ear each year. OSM has no way to add "this business will be closed on these holidays this year, next year might be different". When lots of businesses introduced modified hours during the Covid lockdowns, there was no concept of temporary opening hours so a "opening_hours:covid19" was introduced. Older data consumers simply ignored that tag. More generally OSM is only for data that is (mostly) permanent. Adding "this business will be closed for Christmas this year" is not OSM data. "This business is closed on Christmas" can be added on OSM. But many businesses don't plan that far ahead as to have set announced holiday hours that can be written in the OSM opening_hours syntax.
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