Organised Editing/Activities/Oscar Car Rental location maintenance
Oscar Car Rental — location maintenance
Who we are
Oscar Car Rental is a car-rental company operating ~665 branches across six countries under local trading names: Oscar Biludlejning (Denmark, hejoscar.dk), Oscar Autoverhuur (Netherlands, oscar.nl), Oscar Autovermietung (Germany, oscar.auto), Oscar Alquiler de Coches (Spain, oscar.es), Oscar (Belgium, oscar.be) and Oscar Car Rental (United States, driveoscar.com). Each branch is operated by an independent local partner company under the Oscar brand. Contact: OSM message to either account below, or at ot@driveoscar.com - We reply within a few business days and we stop editing on request while any concern is discussed.
Accounts
- Oscar Car Rental (on OSM · edits · contribs · heatmap · comments) — manual edits by an employee since May 2025 (~327 edits, mainly Netherlands and Spain). This page retroactively declares those edits: they were made in good faith by our employee before we were aware of the Organised Editing Guidelines. This account continues to be used for occasional manual edits and community communication.
- OscarCarRental_import (on OSM · edits · contribs · heatmap · comments) — dedicated account for the automated, human-reviewed edits described on this page (per the Import/Guidelines dedicated-account convention).
Goal
Keep OpenStreetMap's data about our own branches accurate:
- Create the ~217 branches still absent from OSM — Germany, Belgium and Spain, counts per country below. (Denmark, the Netherlands and the United States were completed in July 2026.)
- Update our own existing branch POIs when facts change in our operational system (opening hours, phone, website, address) — including correcting known copy-paste errors in some of our earlier manual edits in Spain (Dutch URLs on Spanish branches).
- Retire permanently closed branches — following each country's community preference. Germany (per the DE thread, August 2026): points clearly assignable to a permanently closed branch are deleted, including community-created ones — no lifecycle prefix. United States (per the US thread, July 2026): elements are retagged with the
disused:lifecycle prefix (amenity,name,brand,operator,ref) and stale contact facts removed. Elsewhere (until the local community expresses a preference): points we created ourselves (and that no one else has edited) are removed; community-created or community-edited elements are retaggeddisused:, never deleted. We only touch POIs that are Oscar branches. Facts only — no promotional wording.
Scope (as of August 2026)
| Country | Branches | Already in OSM | To create |
|---|---|---|---|
| Denmark | 142 | 142 — all listed (import completed July 2026) | 0 (done) |
| Netherlands | 152 | 150 (imported July 2026 + earlier manual edits; 4 merged onto BAG address nodes) | 0 (done; 2 possible matches under review) |
| United States | 38 | 38 — all listed (import completed July 2026; 3 closed branches retagged disused:) |
0 (done) |
| Germany | 93 | 0 | ~93 |
| Belgium | 95 | 0 | ~95 |
| Spain | 143 | 106 (our earlier manual edits) | ~29 (+8 possible matches under manual review) |
Tags
We write only the following keys, and never modify or remove any other key on any
element (existing tags added by the community — e.g. payment:*,
wheelchair — are always preserved):
amenity=car_rental, name, brand,
brand:wikidata, branch, ref,
opening_hours, phone, website,
addr:street, addr:housenumber, addr:postcode,
addr:city
ref is the branch number — the same identifier we publish on each branch's page
on our own websites (schema.org branchCode), so anyone can verify a POI against
our official public data.
Address tags follow local convention. In Denmark, where every address is maintained as a separate official address node, we omit addr:* and instead place each POI accurately by its address node (per community feedback, July 2026). In Belgium we likewise omit addr:* and rely on accurate placement + reverse geocoding (per community feedback, August 2026). In the Netherlands postcodes are written in BAG spelling, without a space (per community feedback, July 2026). In other countries we include addr:* unless the local community prefers we rely on official address data — we ask in each country's announcement.
Brand identity per country: brand:wikidata is the country's own item (thanks to
community help in our US announcement thread creating the missing ones): Denmark
Q127731404, Netherlands Q130349057, Germany
Q140566458, Spain Q140566470, Belgium
Q140566474, United States Q140566150.
name is the local trading name only; the city/site qualifier goes in
branch.
On operator: we currently write no operator tag. Community feedback
(July 2026) correctly notes that under our franchise model the operator is the local partner
business, not the brand. We intend to add each branch's local trading name as
operator in a follow-up reviewed batch, once we have aligned the naming with our
partner businesses; until then we neither add nor modify operator values.
Example (Denmark):
amenity=car_rental name=Oscar Biludlejning brand=Oscar Biludlejning brand:wikidata=Q127731404 branch=Rønde ref=5 opening_hours=Mo-Fr 08:00-17:30; Sa 09:00-13:00 phone=+45 XX XX XX XX website=https://hejoscar.dk/…
(No addr:* in Denmark — see the address-convention note above. In countries that
include address tags, the same example additionally carries addr:street,
addr:housenumber, addr:postcode and addr:city.)
Data source and licence
All data comes from our own first-party operational database (branch master data we maintain for our day-to-day business). Oscar Car Rental, as the owner of this data, explicitly grants its use in OpenStreetMap under the ODbL. No third-party sources are used.
Method (import plan)
This section serves as our import plan per Import/Guidelines and Import/Plan Outline.
- Tooling: our in-house operations platform talks directly to the API v0.6 (osmChange diff upload). No third-party editor involved.
- Human review: every batch is prepared per country and an employee reviews the complete tag set of every element before upload. Nothing is uploaded unreviewed.
- Conflation: before any creation we (1) match our branch list against existing OSM data for the whole country (weekly Overpass sweep:
amenity=car_rentalwith name/brand matching "Oscar"), and (2) at upload time query the live API for any existingamenity=car_rentalelement within 150 m of the branch coordinates. Existing elements are adopted/updated, never duplicated.
- Changesets: one changeset per country batch, always carrying the hashtag #oscarcarrental plus
comment,created_by,source,url(this page),bot=yes, andimport=yeson creation batches. All our edits are trivially isolable in OSMCha via the hashtag.
- Community notice: each country batch is announced in that country's category on community.openstreetmap.org no less than two weeks before it runs. Links to the announcement threads are collected below.
- Pace: at most one batch per country per day; batches are 30–150 elements.
- Revert plan: if a local community objects, we stop immediately and revert on request — the hashtag isolates every edit. Conflicts with human edits are never overwritten by the pipeline: if a mapper changed one of our fact tags, the element is flagged for manual review internally.
Timeframe
- Announcements and this declaration: July 2026.
- Each country's batch runs no earlier than two weeks after that country's announcement (threads listed below).
- Denmark is first: no earlier than 28 July 2026. The Netherlands and the United States are announced in the same period; Germany, Belgium and Spain will be announced once the Danish batch has completed cleanly.
- Ongoing maintenance (updates and retirements) thereafter, at low volume.
Results
Monthly one-line updates will be posted here (elements created/updated per country, issues raised and resolved).
- July 2026: Denmark — 142/142 branches listed (128 imported, rest adopted/community-made; 2 relocations synced). Netherlands — 150 listed (4 new nodes since merged onto BAG address nodes with community help). United States — 35 created with
operator, 3 closed branches retaggeddisused:. Community-raised issues (3 imprecise positions in NL, phone-number formats, US street abbreviations, lifecycle-prefix completeness) all fixed — details in the threads below.