Is there any free geo database?

Question

I want to build an location based application, and I don't know how to get some location data, like: the latitude and longitude of nearby starbucks, KFC, or pizza?

Is there any free database on the internet? how does others get those data? like yelp, foursquare?

Answer 1

Openstreetmap has quite a few POI in their database i think, check out their rendered map if it does contain the info you need.

Oh, and you need around 100GB for the full db :)

Answer 2

See if answers to this question about open source POI databases are of any help to you:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1875255/open-source-poi-database