Free Business Data From OpenStreetMap: What You Can Do With It This Week
OpenStreetMap is a free world map built by a community of mappers, a bit like Wikipedia for maps. Anyone can view it, edit it and reuse its data: streets, addresses, and businesses with their names, types and sometimes opening hours.
Ways to use it this week
- Check your own listing. Search for your business on openstreetmap.org. If it is missing or wrong, you can make a free account and fix it. Other maps and apps are allowed to reuse this data, so a correct entry can show up in more places.
- See who else is nearby. A bakery or a cleaning company can pull a one-off list of every business of one type in part of town with a free tool called Overpass.
- Put a map on your contact page. OpenStreetMap maps can sit on a small business website, as long as the credit is shown and the rules below are followed.
Try it now (no key): open https://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/search?q=bakery+San+Antonio+Texas&format=json&limit=3 . Nominatim is OpenStreetMap's search tool. It returns three San Antonio bakeries with full street addresses, and each result carries the line "Data © OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL 1.0."
Limits and rules
These free public services have strict fair-use rules:
- Nominatim (search): "an absolute maximum of 1 request per second." Save (cache) your results, no bulk jobs spread over many computers, and no search-as-you-type boxes built on it. Apps must name themselves: "stock User-Agents as set by http libraries will not do."
- Overpass (lists of places): under 10,000 queries a day is fine for a one-off job. For anything that runs regularly, divide that by 100. The OpenStreetMap wiki also says "Commercial use should use self-hosted or paid Overpass servers." The public server gets busy, and one of our test requests timed out.
- Map pictures (tiles): no offline use or bulk downloading, "no SLA or guarantee," and access can be withdrawn. If a site can't meet the rules, the policy points to other providers that serve OpenStreetMap maps.
License and credit: the data is under the Open Database License (ODbL). Show the credit "© OpenStreetMap contributors," usually in a corner of the map, and make clear the data is under the ODbL, for example by linking the credit to the OpenStreetMap copyright page. If you change or build on the data and share the result, you must share it under the same license.
Golden Rock can wire OpenStreetMap maps or place lists into a client's website or app while following these rules.
Who should care: any local business with a street address that customers look up on a map.