I have been looking for free for commercial use way to get information on police, fire, hospitals etc.. near an arbitrary location. (middle of a large city, or a desert). What are some good sources for this kind of information that I may have missed? free or not.
+2
A:
The company I work for is currently doing such a project. We did not find anything like that, so we went out ourselves to gather the data and we are currently building such a database (planned to be sold as a service).
What we did was contacting authorities for lists of these places, then partly send out field agents to verify that data until there is critical mass, but also involve phone agents to verify whatever is possible over the phone.
Bandi-T
2010-01-22 18:42:38
This sounds like a perfect fit, except for the coverage area. I know this would be difficult to answer, would you happen to know a few services that cover the USA?
Discoloda
2010-01-22 22:59:51
Sorry, I genuinely don't know any - but I also wasn't the one doing the research for one. Also, as far as I know we were only doing a research for Europe, as that is the market we had the biggest demand on and are currently working on covering; US and Canada is planned to be a close second as far as I hear.
Bandi-T
2010-01-22 23:42:29
A:
First of all, this sort of information is very regional. What part of the world are you wanting information on?
While I admit it's not an ideal solution, you may be able to harvest the information you need from Google Maps. For example, if you searched Google Maps for category:"Health & Medical - Hospitals" loc: 60652, you would get a list of hospitals in the Chicago, Illinois, USA area. There is an API available for Google Maps in a number of different programming/scripting languages. If your application has web access, you may be able to use this to farm out the hard part to Google Maps. Then again, I don't know if there are any commercial restrictions to using Google's API, you'd want to get a lawyer-type person to read through their ToU.
If you are only needing information for a limited area, you may be better off contacting emergency service providers and getting information directly.
bta
2010-01-22 22:14:47
The problem is that the google maps API is strictly for javascript, our product is going to be a mobile application. The area required is (at the moment) the USA
Discoloda
2010-01-22 22:58:17
You could extract a list of hospitals from the web (I would find it hard to imagine there were no lists of hospitals at least per state online), verify and enhance that list and transfer it to your mobile application. Navigation maps (e.g. NavTeq) occasionally happen to have POIs for hospitals, police offices and firefighters, but in our research that data proved to be far from complete.
Bandi-T
2010-01-22 23:46:35
@Discoloda: The Google maps API has bindings available for more than Javascript (e.g. Flash). Many of Google maps' features are accessible via a HTTP request (the geocoder, for one) which you can generate and process using practically any language. What language(s) are you planning on using? I may already know of a library you could use.
bta
2010-02-16 19:06:01