[Imports] Importing a list of (business) locations?

[Mark Gray]

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