Over at Yell we have such data and I'm trying to persuade them to open it up through a public facing API.
Restaurants, locations, contacts details, opening times, photos of the facade and sometimes of the inside, some menus.
We also have a lot of other data for things like bars (what beers they have, do they have a garden, how many TV screens) and other business types.
The obstacles we've encountered to opening the data are:
1) Fear. Parts of Yell fear that the data they spend time and money creating and collating will be scraped and the crown jewels given away for free.
2) Politics. Different parts of Yell view the opening of data differently and will fight over any move even if they are in general agreement... nothing gets done.
I am trying to argue that on #1 that if they really need to fear something it should be not moving with the times. And also through the use of things like API keys that we could rate limit to some extent to prevent major scraping occurring if they really think it's a big problem.
And on #2 it's currently part of their business to argue a lot it seems.
I believe that if they could see the value in opening data that both would be a non-issue and it would just be done. So I'm also working on trying to document examples of how people could use such an API that is beneficial to Yell. And on that note... if anyone has such examples I'd be glad to hear them.
It's pretty simple. I've never heard of Yell before now. If they'd opened up this data, than I would have. Especially if they only allowed usage under an attribution required license.
Restaurants, locations, contacts details, opening times, photos of the facade and sometimes of the inside, some menus.
We also have a lot of other data for things like bars (what beers they have, do they have a garden, how many TV screens) and other business types.
The obstacles we've encountered to opening the data are: 1) Fear. Parts of Yell fear that the data they spend time and money creating and collating will be scraped and the crown jewels given away for free. 2) Politics. Different parts of Yell view the opening of data differently and will fight over any move even if they are in general agreement... nothing gets done.
I am trying to argue that on #1 that if they really need to fear something it should be not moving with the times. And also through the use of things like API keys that we could rate limit to some extent to prevent major scraping occurring if they really think it's a big problem.
And on #2 it's currently part of their business to argue a lot it seems.
I believe that if they could see the value in opening data that both would be a non-issue and it would just be done. So I'm also working on trying to document examples of how people could use such an API that is beneficial to Yell. And on that note... if anyone has such examples I'd be glad to hear them.