[Imports] Postcodes and address metadata from Food Standards Agency data

[Tom Morris]

Greetings OSMers, 

I'm a bit new to the OSM community, but have just got heavily active in mapping locally and attended my first OSM meet up in London this week.

I wrote a blog post the other day for a new blog called Adventures in Dataland about an off-license shop in Brighton and trying to verify whether it existed.

http://adventuresindataland.tumblr.com/post/24478902110/finding-bargain-booze-in-brighton

In the process of writing that blog post I came across the fact that the Food Standards Agency have XML data available listing metadata about each business or organisation they inspect. This includes comprehensive street addresses and some geolocation information.

I had a look at the data for Brighton and verified the addresses of a few places in the data. It's pretty good.

I've also written a script that takes the Food Standards Agency XML data for a particular place, and a Planet file for the same area and then basically generates a stream of metadata improvements for places already in OSM.

What I'd like to do is run this specifically to improve our address and postcode metadata for businesses in the UK. The data covers restaurants, cafes, pubs, bars, takeaways, shops that sell food and drink, and other organisations that prepare food including things like church and community groups.

I'm looking into the legalities, but I think the data is licensed under the Open Government License, which is basically the UK government version of the CC BY license. I'm not sure how attribution would work, but other than that, I can't see any legal issues.

Is this a good idea? Any advice on what the next steps are to start importing this data?

-- 
Tom Morris
<http://tommorris.org/>