How to Use Food Hygiene Data to Improve OSM

In the UK we have the Food Standards Agency, they do a few things, but they are know for the green stickers in cafe windows. It's a rating 0-5 on cleanliness and stuff.

They publish that data under the Open Government Licence v3.0 which can be used in OSM. Awesome. gregrs has a tool for it. Perfect.

Linking OSM and FHRS is fairly simple, but it can be time consuming. First to the "Suggested matches" section, when you click a dot it'll have 2 names, the OSM one and the FHRS name. if tease are in fact the same establishment click "Add tags in JOSM", correct the address data and there you go. Once all those are done the above section "Overview" shows objects that should be matchable but haven't been automatically. Again time consuming, but worth it. User agents can show the green sticker the same as in the window. An awesome lining up of interests between OSM and FSA.

Once OSM places are linked with FHRS we can get notified when an establishment closes. In the above tool it'll turn red and be added to the "Mismatched fhrs:id tags" list. Now this can be a bit of a trick, establishments aren't supposed to change there id, however they often do, to hide there history. So first thing you should do is check if there is a new id in the area that matches the establishment, if so just change the id. If there isn't I would survey the establishment and then you may be able to remove it from OSM.

Cj Malone on