Last week, the climate officer from my local county council reached out to me to see whether “we” (i.e. OSM) had locations for drinking_water:refill mapped. (She used to be the heritage officer, so she knows well what I do).
After some confusion about what she meant (I thought holy wells…), I found that there was one mapped as amenity=drinking_water, but without the drinking_water:refill tag.
I presume the reason she is asking is that the council wants to install more, but doesn’t know where there are already some.
Some more research revealed that there are at least two providers in Ireland, both use GoogleMaps, one not very successfully: EcoFil. In agreement with the OpenStreetMap Ireland board, I sent emails to both companies to ask whether they could make their datasets open giving the county council analysis as one example for the usefulness of #OpenData in this case, pointing out that they could also benefit from a complete dataset.
(overpass-turbo for Republic of Ireland)
I remembered that I had mapped some refill stations along a cycle path and spent some hours tidying the tags using reason, Mapillary and Bing Streetside. Some fixmes might also have been added…
Me being me, I’ve also started some short videos on how to map the refill amenities. I’m also adding drinking_water:refill:self_service=yes/no to the ones I’m mapping, because I think it might be important for very shy people or people who don’t want anyone else touching their bottle. One of the providers (Refill Ireland) also happens to have that option in their app. I didn’t know that when I came up with the idea, though. The data in the app is not up to date, by the way.