Building a database of local venues/businesses

Question

Does anybody have any experience or suggestions for building a database of local venues/businesses to be used in a web app?

Would scraping Yelp/Facebook Places/Foursquare or any similar websites with locations be the best way to go about it?

Answer 1

There is no perfect data source, but the following resources may provide you with some ideas

Copyrighted data sources:

• https://www.yelp.com/developers/documentation - Yelp API
• Facebook API
• Google Places API - https://developers.google.com/places/webservice/intro
• Foursquare API - http://www.programmableweb.com/api/foursquare

Free/community data sources:

• https://www.openstreetmap.org/ - community maintained map where you can add details about shops, cafes, restaurants, petrol straions, etc. Quality vary per location.
• http://www.freebase.com/ - provides location data which could be freely used and retrieved using API.