About & Sources

What this is

Open Oman is an independent, bilingual guide to the places of Oman and the licensed local operators who run experiences there. It is not a booking platform and takes no commission on anything a reader does after leaving a page. It is built from open data, assembled by a small editorial team, and published with every fact carrying the name of where it came from.

Where the facts come from

• OpenStreetMap (ODbL) — place locations, names, roads, and the toilets, car parks, water points and shops mapped around each place. Every value taken from it links to the object on the map.
• Wikidata (CC0) and Wikipedia — identities, articles and, where licensed, photographs via Wikimedia Commons. Every photograph names its author and licence.
• Overture Maps — a second source for place identities, used to corroborate rather than to add.
• NASA SRTM (public domain) — the ground elevation at each coordinate. Where a crowd-entered tag disagrees with the terrain model by more than 200 m, the model is used and the page says so.
• National authorities — the aviation regulator's own page for the drone rule, re-checked and dated.
• Editorial review — season windows, safety notes, and how-long / how-hard / who-for guidance, written per category and reviewed on a stated date.

What the labels mean

• Source: osm / wikidata / official / srtm — a value recorded for this specific place, with a link to the record.
• Category default — guidance for this kind of place, not a measurement of this one. A wadi is typically two to four hours; this wadi may not be.
• Not confirmed for this place — nobody has recorded it in any source we use. We do not guess. Entry fees, opening hours and step-free access are the fields most often in this state, because the only source for them is someone who has been there.
• Representative photo — a licensed photograph of the same kind of place in the same country, never presented as the place itself and never used in structured data.

How the text is written

Descriptions are generated from the facts above by templates written by the editorial team, then checked by automated gates that fail the build if a page claims anything the data does not hold — a season, a fee, a 4x4 requirement — or if two pages describe the same place. No text is produced by a language model, and nothing is written to rank; if a fact is unknown the page says so.

Corrections

Every place page has a "Know one of these? Tell us" link that opens an e-mail to hello@openoman.com with the place already named. Corrections are reviewed by a person and, where they can be checked against a source, published at the next build. Operators can claim and correct their own listing from the operators page.

Who we are

Open Oman is operated by an independent publisher of open travel directories for the Gulf. We have no commercial relationship with any place listed. Operators may pay for a verified or featured listing; that status is always labelled, never affects the facts, and never affects whether a place appears.