Comment by yummypaint
4 years ago
Alot of that info is probably already publicly available as GIS datasets. Many counties and cities have surprisingly good web interfaces to such information or at least will let you download it. Most people probably use it to look up land parcel information, but they usually include many more layers such hydrants, water and sewer, sometimes detailed local electrical grid info depending how local utilities operate.
Someone should make a crawler that specifically looks for GIS data on government pages and auto-adds it if passes sanity checks and is up-to-date.
Let me be the one to say: Open Street Map has had some difficult experiences with automated edits, and has developed a process to prevent such problems.
Creating such a bot might get edits reverted, unless done consistent with their policies: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Automated_edits
In addition, the licensing of "public" datasets is not always aligned with the Open Database License (ODbL) used by OpenStreetMap.
It's an issue faced by contributors globally.
For example you can see recent import and revert at https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/tags/amenity=fire_station#... that is listing how many fire stations are mapped worldwide.
Some well meaning person imported outdated dataset of fire stations in USA. Quality of data was - lets say - not great.