How The Data Pond was born.
While working on a side project, I was looking for a way to get a list of restaurants in a given city. I needed a list of websites for a particular type of business (restaurants) in order to check which kind of technology they use and which kind of server they need. I did extensive research and found nothing satisfactory.
So I tried to get this information from Google Maps and Foursquare until I read their terms of service. Obviously, data from services such as Google Maps or Foursquare can not be used extracted. For example, the Google Maps Terms of Service (3.2.4) states "Customer will not extract, export, scrape, or cache Google Maps Content for use outside the Services".
Then I tried OpenStreetMaps and found what I was looking for: a list that could be used without constraints. However, it is quite difficult to extract these data. That's when I decided to create a tool to automate the process.
If you want to get data from the map, the procedure is pretty simple : you draw a geographic zone on the map, define your parameters (categories, keywords...) and you get a list of names, addresses, websites, telephone numbers...
The data you get are not as rich as data from services like Google Maps or Foursquare but, at least, it is legal to use them (ODC Open Database License).
The website is not completely finished, there are still 1000 things to do: design, typo, features, improve lists... but the idea is to continue development based on comments or requests from users.
You can try it out with the demo.
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