Free (and messy from data user perspective) tagging of OSM is not a bug but feature: the system is optimized for map creator. Maybe it is the main thing why OSM

Free (and messy from data user perspective) tagging of OSM is not a bug but feature: the system is optimized for map creator. Maybe it is the main thing why OSM was (and is) success compared to many other crowdmapping attempts. Sure map users now need to do cleaning and quality control, but this is always application-specific and cannot be forced to the mappers. I feel OSM balance between structure and freedom is good enough. Now some map applications are quite standard: eg nice base map and navigation, so for these quite many companies have built own data cleaning/structuring/rendering stacks, where only some pieces are easily available as OS, rest is kept as business secrets. I hope Overture will provide usable OS full stack here. Certainly this will be also specific to the contributors own interests, and it does not try to “fix” OSM into well structured database.