Hi, first day using OSM, first question! The story: I'm in the middle of 6 weeks of radiotherapy treatment for prostate cancer at Charing Cross Hospital in London. Without going into any detail, the locations of public toilets are quite important for men with prostate issues (as indeed they are for men and women with all sorts of other health issues)! I am also a web manager used to dealing with open data, apis, mapping and crowdsourcing, although primarily in the cultural sector. So my thoughts immediately turned to whether there was an app available or whether I could build something. In short, anything that already exists appears to be either not working, old and neglected, or covers a specific locality. So apologies for the fairly long post, but here goes ... The idea: I'd like to create a simple mobile app (or mobile optimised site) to display the nearest toilets. Initially I'm thinking UK, but there's no reason why it couldn't be more global. I would also like to include a layer of related information that would be useful to people undergoing treatment, primarily contributed by the users themselves (probably stored in either a Wiki or Wordpress type site) and including the sorts of things that wouldn't suit OSM like comments, ratings, tips and advice etc. Much to my surprise (now naive!) there doesn't appear to be an 'official' UK dataset for public conveniences so that's when I thought of OSM. To prove the map concept I have gone to http://overpass-turbo.eu/ and amended the query to <has-kv k="amenity" v="toilets"/> and it works quite nicely, but I can already see lots of gaps for the area that I know. But lots of potential to get local people with specific knowledge to fill those gaps. My questions: - is this just reinventing someone else's wheel? - what's the easiest way to pull specific data (in this case based on a query for facility:toilets) statically or dynamically from OSM and display it on a map? I am quite familiar with OpenLayers if that's of any help. - if my users want to create new facilities I would envisage creating a bespoke interface in my app/site for them and then manually or semi-automatically transferring anything that is appropriate back into OSM. Are there any examples of this sort of indirect crowdsourcing feeding content back into OSM, and are there any issues that would prevent this? - I have long been a fan of Give Me Tap (see link below) and the way they have got private businesses (mainly cafes) to sign up to give free tap water if you present one of their nice shiny bottles. For toilets there is a scheme known as 'Just Can't Wait' but they don't have the same concept of signed-up, approved locations and as such they don't have a map. I'd love to get businesses to sign-up and add themselves, especially those near places like treatment centres. Would displaying these this be something that would fall outside the scope of OSM or could it be embraced within the metadata like access=permissive or access=customers (or even something new like access=onrequest)? Handy sites: - http://overpass-turbo.eu/s/2H9 - example of toilet map from OSM - http://goo.gl/maps/QPK1y - same example but using Google maps search - http://taps.givemetap.co.uk/find_taps - initiative to locate sources of free tap water when you present your branded bottle; charitable setup raises funds for drinking water in Africa - http://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/ - an obvious example of crowdsourced locations and reviews - http://www.cyclestreets.net/photomap/ - a grassroots crowdsourced map of cycle infrastructure - http://www.macmillan.org.uk/Cancerinformation/Cancertypes/Prostate/Livingwithprostatecancer/Sideeffects.aspx#DynamicJumpMenuManager_6_Anchor_3 - Just Can't Wait card - http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:amenity%3Dtoilets - reference page for toilet nodes Any pointers would be gratefully received. Cheers, James

Hi, first day using OSM, first question! The story: I'm in the middle of 6 weeks of radiotherapy treatment for prostate cancer at Charing Cross Hospital in London. Without going into any detail, the locations of public toilets are quite important for men with prostate issues (as indeed they are for men and women with all sorts of other health issues)! I am also a web manager used to dealing with open data, apis, mapping and crowdsourcing, although primarily in the cultural sector. So my thoughts immediately turned to whether there was an app available or whether I could build something. In short, anything that already exists appears to be either not working, old and neglected, or covers a specific locality. So apologies for the fairly long post, but here goes ... The idea: I'd like to create a simple mobile app (or mobile optimised site) to display the nearest toilets. Initially I'm thinking UK, but there's no reason why it couldn't be more global. I would also like to include a layer of related information that would be useful to people undergoing treatment, primarily contributed by the users themselves (probably stored in either a Wiki or Wordpress type site) and including the sorts of things that wouldn't suit OSM like comments, ratings, tips and advice etc. Much to my surprise (now naive!) there doesn't appear to be an 'official' UK dataset for public conveniences so that's when I thought of OSM. To prove the map concept I have gone to http://overpass-turbo.eu/ and amended the query to <has-kv k="amenity" v="toilets"/> and it works quite nicely, but I can already see lots of gaps for the area that I know. But lots of potential to get local people with specific knowledge to fill those gaps. My questions: - is this just reinventing someone else's wheel? - what's the easiest way to pull specific data (in this case based on a query for facility:toilets) statically or dynamically from OSM and display it on a map? I am quite familiar with OpenLayers if that's of any help. - if my users want to create new facilities I would envisage creating a bespoke interface in my app/site for them and then manually or semi-automatically transferring anything that is appropriate back into OSM. Are there any examples of this sort of indirect crowdsourcing feeding content back into OSM, and are there any issues that would prevent this? - I have long been a fan of Give Me Tap (see link below) and the way they have got private businesses (mainly cafes) to sign up to give free tap water if you present one of their nice shiny bottles. For toilets there is a scheme known as 'Just Can't Wait' but they don't have the same concept of signed-up, approved locations and as such they don't have a map. I'd love to get businesses to sign-up and add themselves, especially those near places like treatment centres. Would displaying these this be something that would fall outside the scope of OSM or could it be embraced within the metadata like access=permissive or access=customers (or even something new like access=onrequest)? Handy sites: - http://overpass-turbo.eu/s/2H9 - example of toilet map from OSM - http://goo.gl/maps/QPK1y - same example but using Google maps search - http://taps.givemetap.co.uk/find_taps - initiative to locate sources of free tap water when you present your branded bottle; charitable setup raises funds for drinking water in Africa - http://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/ - an obvious example of crowdsourced locations and reviews - http://www.cyclestreets.net/photomap/ - a grassroots crowdsourced map of cycle infrastructure - http://www.macmillan.org.uk/Cancerinformation/Cancertypes/Prostate/Livingwithprostatecancer/Sideeffects.aspx#DynamicJumpMenuManager_6_Anchor_3 - Just Can't Wait card - http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:amenity%3Dtoilets - reference page for toilet nodes Any pointers would be gratefully received. Cheers, James