How to import my POIs (hotels, bar, etc..)into open street map?

You can load GPX files into most OSM editors, however we don't encourage people to simply upload data to OSM because it might clash with existing data! You would normally load your GPX data into an editor, then load the existing OSM data for the same area, and only where the POI is not present in OSM would you manually create a POI at the correct location.

(I'll assume that, if you're relatively new to OSM, you'll be wanting to use "Potlatch" the online editor)

Your GPX files can be uploaded to OSM, and GPX files from Garmin devices can contain "wpt" information. In order to upload the trace you'll need to ensure that there's at a small track in the file as well.

• Upload your GPS trace and wait for it to be processed
• Edit your GPS track from the list in OSM
• Wait for your blue trace to appear
• Waypoints will appear as orange dots
• In Potlatch, select "background, vector file", and tick the "select" box next to your GPS trace.
• Close the "load vector file" box.

For each waypoint that you've uploaded, you'll need to review what's already in OSM for it. You might just need to correct a name, add some other tags, or you might want to convert your waypoint to a node in OSM. To do that:

• alt-click on the orange dot
• click "advanced" at the left
• remove any tags you want to remove (you'll definitely want to remove "cmt" and "desc", and you'll probably want to correct the name)
• add any new tags that you want to add

One big caveat though - you should only upload information that you've created yourself. If you've gone somewhere, saved a waypoint and entered all details against it yourself, then that's OK. If you've saved a feature from a non-OSM Garmin map as a waypoint, then that's NOT OK, because there's information that's come from other than your own work.

When I have to import POI from GPX data I collected during holidays I do the following:

1. convert the waypoints from GPX to .csv using GPSbabel with a little script
2. Import the csv into a spread sheet
3. edit the spread sheet so that the first column contains the first key, the second column the first value, the third column the second key and so on
   (e.g. tourism;motel;name;FourTwo Inn)
4. after having finished that I convert the .csv to .osm using awk. Sorry I don't have a script at hand, mostly I hack that as an ugly one-liner
5. open the created osm-file in JOSM,
6. copy a handful of the created POI within a small area into a new layer
7. download that region from OSM
8. check if there are any duplicates (and enhance them if possible by the collected data)
9. upload