[black_puppydog]

I've been mapping out shops, their contacts, cuisines (for restaurants), opening hours etc in my area. It's a lot of work and much of the information will actually simply not be available to me without a shop owner. So I'm trying to get some of them to update their own shop information. But I'm really struggling to find good arguments. Small shop owners often have quite stressful days already and taking even five minutes to update some information only makes sense if I can present them with a case that this will help their business.

Does anybody here know of ways that OSM data is used and products that people actually use to find businesses? I have heard rumors that Apple pulls data from OSM every now and again in areas where their own datasets are sparse. But do we have anything more meaningful or more concrete that would work in an area like France where data is not necessarily sparse in Apple's maps? (I'm saying this looking at Google Maps here in southern France where half of the shops that it displays just don't exist anymore for years...)

[esperent]

> So I'm trying to get some of them to update their own shop information. But I'm really struggling to find good arguments.

I did that for my business (a bakery). Spent ages on it, put in all the details I could think of. At the end of the process there seemed to be a requirement to send it you review so I did that. This was several months ago (probably six months), and it's never showed up.

I'm busy, and I have a thousand more useful things to do for my business. I'm very unlikely to try again.

On the other hand, if the process had been easier I'd probably have then gone on to adding other businesses in the area.

The actual business is listed, but with a slightly wrong name. But I can put that exact slightly wrong name into the search on openstreetmap.org right now and there's zero results.

Then I can manually zoom to the location (which is correct), see my business, tap on it... And nothing. It doesn't open. So given all of this, why would I bother with openstreetmaps as a business owner?

[KomoD]

Seems like a trend with your business, though:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36566783

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44364090

Banned from Google Maps, banned from Instagram...

[esperent]

Yep, both of those things actually happened, what's your point? I'd love to say we were just unlucky but unfortunately I think it's par for the course when running a small business these days. At least when I was researching how to fix these I found a lot of other people with similar problems and a while industry of YouTubers and bloggers claiming to show you how to fix it.

We got back on Google maps after a few weeks and haven't had any problems since. We never got back on Instagram and had to make a new account, although to be honest we've barely used it since our business pretty much all comes from Google maps.

[jllyhill]

Do you remember what you've used to add your business? The process shouldn't be so difficult and normally the changes to the OpenStreetMaps database are instant and don't require any moderation or review. There are some sites that were intended to help business owners to get info to the database, maybe there's a problem with one of them.

> The actual business is listed, but with a slightly wrong name. But I can put that exact slightly wrong name into the search on openstreetmap.org right now and there's zero results.

Can you give the name and location? I can look it up to see if there are any errors.

> Then I can manually zoom to the location (which is correct), see my business, tap on it... And nothing. It doesn't open. So given all of this, why would I bother with openstreetmaps as a business owner?

That's the part that annoys me the most. Counterintuitively the map at openstreetmap.org is NOT intended to be an interactive common user web-map, a Google map alternative. It is a non-interactive map for the mapping volunteers to get feedback on whether their changes to the OpenStreetMap database were correct. While you can still right click on a feature, select "Query feature" and look at the raw text, you are better look up your business on something like mapy.com or an app like CoMaps (that use OSM data to create a Google map alternative) to understand what would the users see.

[jllyhill]

You can get some info on the tag use with taginfo, e.g. https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/keys/cuisine#projects But it is really technical and not all projects provide this info.

The most obvious place where people will look for and query this kind of data are the OSM-based map apps: OsmAnd, OrganicMaps, CoMaps, mapy.com etc. I don't know if this data is pulled into other major maps like Google's or Apple's.

[wcedmisten]

For what it's worth, I use OSM for my modest project SurpriseDateSpot[1] which will randomly pick a restaurant (or other amenity) in your area! It gets a few thousand users per month :)

I've also used this project to upstream 2,000 suggested edits to OSM

[1]: https://surprisedatespot.com/