le-bon-tag VS eraser-map

I've once spoken to an OSM "evangelist" and he really struggled to get this point.

In a way I got his point the OSM model can virtually store anything so it's the data provider burden to develop a glue code to interact with OSM.

However because of potential vandalism or sheer goofiness objects and ids can potentially break at anytime so writing glue code is actually not trivial.

Maybe a half way solution would be to promote generic glue code framework. I've heard about this project by a french local authority that help sync back data from OSM to your own database. Dunno if other similar projects exists.

https://gitlab.com/Geonov/le-bon-tag

(Former Mapzen employee here).

I _think_ you're talking about Eraser Map(https://github.com/mapzen/eraser-map) right?

It was awesome! It's the closest I know of to "Google Maps, but open source and based on open data". It was an app built for _end users_, not OSM editors. And it worked pretty darn well. When it didn't, any problems could (at least theoretically) be addressed with improvements to OSM data or the Mapzen open-source projects.

There was a team of at least two people working on it full time, plus lots of work on the design, product, and integration with geocoding, routing, transit etc. The multi-modal (switching from walking to transit to car, etc) transit directions were particularly awesome.

I used it as my daily driver for much of my navigation around NYC, and as time went on only had to fall back to Google Maps maybe 25% of the time, usually for missing POI data.

Unfortunately I think it's one of the few Mapzen projects that hasn't seen new life after the company shut down, and like you said it would take quite a bit of work (read: money) to keep it going. It might be possible with some work to find grant money through a couple organizations. The OSMF has done some awesome work lately with the micro-grants, but this would definitely be a level we haven't seen (yet).