Organised Editing/Activities/VoyagerMaps

Who we are

VoyagerMaps is a travel app that shows travellers the everyday things they need on the road: toilets, drinking water, showers, pharmacies, car parks, charging points and similar. Its map is built from OpenStreetMap data.

• Website: https://getvoyagermaps.com
• Contact: voyagemapsolution@gmail.com
• OSM account used for these uploads: VoyagerMaps

This account does nothing else. It exists so that this activity's edits are separable from anybody's personal mapping: they can be found in one place, discussed as a set, and — if it ever comes to that — reverted as a set, without touching a volunteer's own work.

This activity is run by one person, Kálmán Fekete, who operates VoyagerMaps. Nobody is paid per edit, nobody is given a number to reach, and no target of any kind is attached to this activity. The reports themselves come from the app's users, who are not compensated for them either.

What we upload, and why

Our users are standing in front of the place. When they find that something is wrong — a fountain that no longer runs, a café that closed, a car park that now charges — the app lets them report it. Those reports are worth having in OpenStreetMap, not just in our own database, which is why we send them back.

Only two kinds of change are sent:

1. Corrections to existing elements that a user reported and a reviewer approved.
2. New places a user added that do not exist in OSM yet.

We never upload our own bulk-imported data, our own derived values, or anything a machine inferred. Every single changeset originates in a report written by a person who was there.

The tags we write

The uploader has a fixed whitelist. A field that is not on it is never written, even if we hold it in our own database:

Our field	OSM tag
name	name
description	description
website	website (or the existing contact:website/url)
phone	phone (or the existing contact:phone/contact:mobile/mobile)
opening hours	opening_hours
fee	fee — only the values yes and no
charge	charge, and only on an element that already carries a fee tag
wheelchair	wheelchair
access	access
internet access	internet_access
changing table	changing_table
permanently closed	the primary key is moved to disused:*

Values our own importer produced by interpreting somebody else's wording — for example a fee of "donation" derived from kostenlos, ingyenes or £0.00 — are not uploaded. Sending those back would replace a mapper's own words with our reading of them.

New places are created as nodes with the tags for their type (amenity=toilets, amenity=parking, amenity=drinking_water and so on) plus whatever whitelisted fields the reporter filled in.

How a change gets to OpenStreetMap

1. A user reports a correction, or proposes a new place, in the app.
2. A human reviewer approves or rejects it. Nothing is uploaded without this step.
3. An operator starts the uploader by hand. It is not on a timer.
4. The uploader re-reads the current element from OSM, plans the change against what is there now, and refuses anything it is not sure about.

What the uploader refuses

These stop and wait for a person rather than being guessed at:

• The element changed in a way that touches what we were about to change.
• The place has several primary keys, so which one closed is a judgement call.
• A value we cannot express as an OSM tag.
• A type with no unambiguous tagging — our "food" category, for instance, until the reporter says whether it is a restaurant, a café, a pub, a bar or fast food.
• A new place with something similar already within about 40 m — a possible duplicate.
• A new place with no name, where a name is what would make it verifiable.
• A price with nothing on the element saying the place charges at all.

The plan is also compared against the element before writing: if applying it would change any tag beyond the ones it declared, the whole edit is refused.

Rate and volume

• Runs are started manually, and are expected to be occasional rather than daily.
• At most 50 elements per changeset, and at most 200 elements per run.
• Every changeset carries created_by=VoyagerMaps POI uploader, source=user report via VoyagerMaps, a plain-language comment, and organised_editing:documentation pointing at this page.
• Writes carry the element version we read, so an element that moved on in the meantime is rejected by the API rather than overwritten.

Data sources and licensing

The reports come from our own users, describing what they saw on the ground. We do not copy from Google Maps, from any commercial provider, or from any source whose licence is incompatible with the ODbL.

Users grant the permission to contribute their report to OpenStreetMap in our terms of service: factual place information from a report may be contributed to OpenStreetMap, where it is published under the ODbL in accordance with the OpenStreetMap Foundation's Contributor Terms. Only factual place data travels — never photographs, never Wi-Fi credentials, never anything identifying the person who reported it.

The app says the same thing at the moment of submission, not only in the terms: somebody sending a report is told that it may become part of OpenStreetMap, and that a contribution to a public map cannot be withdrawn afterwards.

No report is uploaded that was submitted before that permission was in force.

Quality assurance

• Every edit is reviewed by a person before upload.
• The uploader refuses ambiguity rather than resolving it (see above).
• Failures and refusals are recorded per proposal, and a reviewer sees them in our back office and decides what to do with each.
• Changesets are small and attributed, so any of them can be found and discussed.

Feedback

If you see an edit from this activity that you disagree with, please tell us — we would rather hear it early. Email voyagemapsolution@gmail.com, and we will answer.

Every changeset carries this page and the account above, so any edit can be traced back to the report behind it.

We will stop the activity while a disputed edit is being discussed, and we will revert our own edits if the community asks us to.