KAFF Places

I've been working on collecting datasets for various chains across the UK, and the globe. Yesterday I changed the repo to open, so say hello to KAFF Places. It's mainly got retail chains, but it also some hotel chains, pharmacies and the like. You can see the list here.

This data is first party from their respective websites, interestingly enough there are a lot more quality issues that come with that than I expected. I have reached out to some of them to point out issues, and I'd love to work with all of them to improve their data.

I'm waving any database rights I may have, but because this is first party data each provider holds copyright and/or database rights. I currently do have some rules on which sites I collect data from, the most important rule is that they are publishing the data in Linked Data or Microdata. I personally believe once somebody explicitly publishes data in a machine readable format they want the data to be used. However the law may disagree, I don't see this being an issue, but use with caution.

Some of this data is already being used by Robert Whittaker in Chain Reaction to help monitor the quality of OSM coverage. I'd also like to see this data being used as an overlay on top of OSM data to increase coverage in under mapped areas, in projects like OsmAnd and Daylight Map Distribution.

Cj Malone on