Sources · OpenStreetMap
OpenStreetMap
OpenStreetMap is the world's collaboratively edited map. West Loop Vibe pulls phone, website, opening hours, and point geometry from OSM via the public Overpass API, then matches each OSM point to a City of Chicago license record by name similarity and proximity.
What we pull
- Phone numbers — currently on 23 of 1,967 active business records.
- Websites — currently on 0 records.
- Opening hours — currently on 8 records (OSM's opening_hours specification, parsed into a structured weekly schedule for the "Open now" badges).
- Point geometry — used to position each business on the maps when the City record lacks latitude/longitude.
Together, about 1% of West Loop businesses have at least one OSM-sourced field. Coverage is concentrated on consumer-facing places that someone has bothered to map — restaurants, bars, shops — and is much lower for office tenants and one-off services.
How matching works
OSM points and City license records describe the same world but use different conventions. We match them with a two-step heuristic:
- Proximity. The OSM point must be within about 30 metres of the City record's geocoded address.
- Name similarity. A Jaro-Winkler comparison of normalized names. The threshold is conservative — false positives are worse than missing a match, because a wrong phone number is harder to spot than an empty one.
Unmatched OSM points are dropped; we don't add OSM-only businesses to the directory. The City record is always the authority for whether a business is open and listed.
Licensing and attribution
OSM data is licensed under the Open Database License (ODbL). West Loop Vibe preserves OSM attribution everywhere this data is shown:
- The MapLibre attribution control on every map credits "© OpenStreetMap contributors."
- Each business page that uses OSM-sourced fields shows a tiny "Edit ↗" link to that OSM record, so corrections can flow back upstream.
- The business's
sources[]JSON-LD names OpenStreetMap as the source for each OSM-sourced field.
When OSM is wrong
OSM is a community project and can be out of date. When a business has closed but is still mapped, or when a phone or hours line is wrong, the right fix is to update OpenStreetMap directly — the change will flow back to West Loop Vibe on the next Monday rebuild. Edit on OpenStreetMap →
Refresh cadence
OSM data is re-pulled every Monday morning at 8 AM Chicago time as part of the weekly refresh pipeline.