Maps Matter: Food Hygiene Open Data : an easy way into mapping addresses and postcodes

"I've written a bit about the Food Safety Agency's Food Hygiene Open Data (henceforward FHRS) before, but as it was the focus of my hacking at last weeks London Hack Weekend, it's about time it had a dedicated post.  To recap the salient points about FHRS data are: It's pretty comprehensive, covering most local authorities in the UK. It represents more than 15% of all postcodes. Most records come with full address data and a location (the postcode centroid). Premises (shops, pubs, cafes etc.,) are grouped into categories which map fairly easily to OSM tags.  Daily updates. High data currency (last reviewed date on all records). It's Open Data under the plain vanilla Open Government Licence. For me the obvious uses of this data with OpenStreetMap are: Analysis of data quality and completeness. (This can be for a given retailer, say, Tesco or Aldi; a given local authority (as in my work with Nottingham data), or for a class of premises (see below)). Enrichment of existing OSM data (e.g., pubs) with addresses and postcodes. Provision of targeted mapping destinations (through the location data). 'Prompted recall'. In many cases one can remember pubs , restaurants and hotels from visits many years ago. I have always resisted mapping such places because it is difficult to know if these places are still in business, and have not changed their names. It's also possible to remember these places and not immediately recall the name. However, the FHRS data enables one to check if a place is still in business (or likely to still be in business) and to refresh one's memory of the names. I used this to add the extant pubs in Hampton Wick (it was the one I used most which has gone). Identifying change. In the simplest case this is just spotting new, closed or renamed premises. On the other hand it may also identify more major developments. In my view the one thing this data is not particularly useful for in an OSM context is storing Food Hygiene ratings. I think these change too much (some places get inspected every 6 months) and maintaining such data is known not to be one of our strengths. Furthermore there are plenty of other ways of acquiring this information including the FSA's own Android, i-phoneand Win8 apps ..."