1

i I am creating an application where you can locate businesses similar to google places, facebook places, foursquare, yellow pages or yelp.

My initial problem is that of populating the data. I currently have zero businesses.

Facebook has a places editor that draws on the knowledge of its users to populate the details of venues.

I'm not sure how the others populated the data other than manually entering details or a large dataset bought from someone like yellow pages.

Any suggestions so that I can (legally) leverage an existing database of geolocated businesses would be great.

I am thinking I would like use googles returned results which are returned and then I would cache them, so that it slowly grows my result set. As to whether google allows this, I'll be looking into it.

Thanks in advance.

Andrew
  • 1,696
  • 2
  • 16
  • 20

2 Answers2

1

What geographic area are you located? We have several 'public domain' datasets for businesses, albeit limited. We can cover the locations of about 30+ major big box retailers. We also have detailed biz info for various parts of Portland, OR and Vancouver, WA.

Andrew (my name too) The team at OpenGeoCode.org

you can email me at: aferlitsch@gmail.com

Andrew - OpenGeoCode
  • 2,299
  • 18
  • 15
1

I've decided to use the google places API for the entirety of of the business geo-location.

Note: In the terms and conditions it states you cannot simply be a wrapper for service and your primary purpose of your application must not be a business directory.

Most of the API's out there stop you from competing in the business directory space ( and I suppose thats fair enough ) you could just whitelabel a new website and call it dooglemaps.

The default 1,000 API calls will be enough before I have to register a creditcard which allows additional API calls.

There are also platforms out there that apps like localmind are using such as http://simplegeo.com/ which uses datasets from http://www.factual.com

Andrew
  • 1,696
  • 2
  • 16
  • 20