Has anyone tried to import a large list of locations? When I add one location of a large chain store to OSM, I think of the list of all their locations which the company already has and keeps up to date. Many companies even have a store locator on their web site. It seems like it could save a lot of effort to do some bulk imports.
Has anyone tried asking a company for their list of locations? I have not yet tried asking and do not know whether companies routinely give out this information. Any experience from the wording of your request to their answer would be welcome. I imagine some companies have a shape file, but others will just have addresses and not have Lat/Lon. Is there a geocoder we are allowed to use? Perhaps we need to wait till we can geocode addresses ourselves? Perhaps we cannot even use their lat/lon if they have them because they may come from a geocoder we can't use. I am sure their list will contain some locations which are already in OSM. With a small list, manually browsing each location in OSM to see what is already there would be fine. With a large list we would want to try some automated checking, which may be complicated by spelling variations and a possible mix of tagging nodes vs. ways. Wherever we find an existing location, we would probably want to use its existing location and manually merge the tags it already has with the ones we have in the list. After such an import, it would be a good idea to get occasional updates from the same source. Closed locations will have been removed and new ones added. Keeping this in mind during the import should make updates easier. If there is already a wiki page related to this kind of import, please point it out. If this kind of discussion has already happened, I apologize for not finding it yet in the archives. -- Mark Gray _______________________________________________ Imports mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/imports
