Telegram Bot for OSM

General talk
1

Hi,

I’ve recently developed a Telegram Bot (https://telegram.me/SearchAroundBot) to enable users to easily add POI (currently only drinking water and toilets amenities) into OSM. Here is the OSM wiki page here: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/SearchAroundBot
I’d like to ask you to have a look at it and let me know if you have any specific suggestion for improving it.

Thanks for your attention,
Federico

2

Currently you seem to be adding all nodes as the user “SearchAroundBot” rather than have each user create an account? That’s going to be a problem, as other OSM users won’t be able to contact the user that actually added the data, only your account. Also how can you agree to OSM’s contributor terms when you don’t know who or where (future) data is coming from?

I’d also suggest mentioning this somewhere that people will actually read it. The English-language forums are something of a backwater (though some other language ones aren’t, e.g. German and Russian). There is a development mailing list over at https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev , and also a general “talk” list at https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk .

3

Thank,

I was sure i had ansered to your post yesterday but now i don’t see it anymore.

Regarding your first concern: since i’m the owner of the account I will take personal responsability of the data which is submitted by Telegram users and will verify it as best as I can (i.e…, checking the picture the user has provided, and making sure it doesn’t overlap with other elements in the map).

Thanks for providing me the links to the other osm channels. I have registered there and asked for feedback.

4

Thanks; I’ve seen the discussion on the mailing list.

5

The bot asked to click the paperclip to add a location. But I see no paperclip in the app…

6

Which Telegram app are you using (web, android, desktop, …)?

8

It is an interesting project, I would however suggest to rethink the authentication. You might be able to support the process for adding new items now, but what about when you get 1000s of POIs or if other life events happens.
Are you able to scale it?

I will try it out next time I am near one of those POIs :slight_smile:

9

Looks like my account has been blocked because I didn’t reply to this last message.
The bot is currently used very little, mainly by me when traveling, and I don’t expect to see any increase in requests. If it ever will, I will consider a more robust mechanism to store tens or hundreds of requests before being pushed to OSM.
Btw, @KasperSFranz have you tried it out?

10

Yes I did try it out.
I tried to add an POI in late November which is not on the map yet so there might be something with the queue to be added :).

The bot works as advertised by showing drinking water close to you

I could however not get the other poi types to work.

11

Thanks @KasperSFranz. I don’t recall receiving any notification of adding a water POI in late November. Could you send me a screenshot? So I can verify if something went wrong there. Can you also elaborate on “could not get the other poi types to work”? Which one have you tried? And what was the response? Thanks

12

I am looking for a solution to create my own categorised Points of Interest (POI) map. I want to be able to add POIs via a Telegram bot and possibly add location data. I also want the ability to search for POIs by province, city, and potentially within a specific radius using the bot.