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Ghosts — Closed or Renamed Shops and Amenities in OpenStreetMap UK

From time to time a chain of stores either re-brands itself (perhaps as the result of a take-over or merger) or goes into administration and shuts down completely. Either way, formerly correctly tagged OSM objects will become out of date. This tool aims to list sets of such objects, to help mappers find and deal with these cases. As well as dealing with the individual instances, the fact that such objects remain a significant time after the stores have closed or been renamed, indicates a shortage of local mappers suggesting that the rest of the local area might need a re-survey too. The data in each of the active sets listed below is updated from OSM roughly once a week.

As well as the pages for each set linked from the table below, mappers may find the "Survey Me!" tool useful, which combines all the Ghosts data, along with data from a number of other tools, to provide details of locations that might benefit from a survey in a given area.

Mechanical Edits Warning: Many of the instances flagged above could be fixed by a bulk mechanical edit. There are two opposing view-points on whether this is a good idea. The first says that if we know something is wrong and can improve it, then we should. The other says that it is better to leave objects like this for local mappers, as it is good to review the object completely, and instances are a good indicator that the whole area could do with being re-surveyed. Whatever your views, the OSM Automated Edits Code of Conduct needs to be followed, so you would need to discuss — and get agreement — on any plans in the Talk GB Mailing List and/or Talk IE Mailing List before going ahead.

I am happy to receive suggestions for improvements to this tool and also ideas for additional sets of shops and amenities that could be added. Please get in touch via my OSM Profile. If you are suggesting a new set to be added, it is helpful if you can provide as much of the following information as possible:

1. A full name (page title) and short name (graph key) for the set.
2. A URL slug to use
3. Whether it's a rename or a closure
4. An overpass turbo query snippet to fetch the objects from OSM.
5. Some descriptive text for the web page.

Examples of each of these bits of information can be found on the pages for the existing sets.

Data derived from OpenStreetMap data, © OpenStreetMap Contributors, licensed under Open Data Commons Open Database License (ODbL). XAPI courtesy of Overpass API.