Commercially supported POI files

I don't get it either, but most companies don't seem interested in company written/maintained POI files for their locations. They seem content with their website based "Store Locator" function. Most won't even give you a location list in a single PC file to make your own POI file.

There have been many posts here by various users that when they contacted a company to request a PC file list of their locations for the purpose of building a POI file, they were either turned down or never got a response.

My neighbor down the street is an executive with a national fast-food chain so I approached him about this for his restaurants. He contacted his higher-ups in the company, and told me they had no interest.

Like I said, I don't get it either.

commercially supported?

Some corporations do provide gps coordinates for their retail locations. Most do not. A great many corporate web sites are GPS friendly in that it is easy to mine the address info where a POI file can be created and then again, many are not.

What is becoming a trend on many websites is the assumption that everyone looking for the nearest location is familiar with the area or knows the zip code for the area. This, to someone who travels extensively is an absolute crock! If I didn't have the zip code for the hotel I'm currently in on the reservation sheet, I would have no clue as to what to enter into someone's search box. It's especially bad when you are driving between two destinations. But enough of that soap box.

Ditto on what Gary A said. I have posted in other posts about the difficulty of obtaining address and/or Lat/Lon's from companies. I emailed Shell Oil asking for their locations twice and was not answered either time. I then called and talked with a very nice young lady and she was all ears. She stated that she would pass it up the line and that it sounded like a good idea to her. This was in January 2009. I still haven't heard from the company. I was able to get most of the Shell locations in Alabama before one of my ISP's was blocked for doing to many station searches. I continued with the other ISP and was able to pretty much finish Alabama and most of Florida. I think in some cases, they don't even know where their outlets are. I can't believe the number of entries I have in a separate file for additional work. It seems that in many instances, different search engines comes up with different addresses for the same business.

FWIW, both of my ISP's are now blocked from doing searches through Shell. I am closing my account and cutting up my card. There are other companies out there I can do business with.

Through ranting now, but not through working on gas station POI's, whatever brand.

Curt

While I was on the Flying J site the other day I ran into 2 gps files of all their locations. I had not run into the files before so I'm not sure how long they have been there.

Harold

I believe Sheetz has POI files on their website.

And it seems to me that one of the big outdoor outfitters (REI, Cabelas, Gander Mountain, or someone) has them or at least a start to them.

to get an officially sanctioned POI listing from a commercial source. They politely replied that they wanted to direct customers through their website. Perhaps this gives them direct market feedback and better control over movement on the site. A downloadable POI file presumably eliminates the need to visit their website more often...

Don't think Cabelas has a POI file posted, but they definitely have the coordinates for their retail stores available online.

You should point out that their Google and MapQuest maps of their store locations is often wrong, and miles out of the way.

With your method the POI files would be corrected and customers would be led to the correct place.

I've never heard of companies blocking people who look at their site too much. Why would they do that?

Got me! I got a list of cities from the internet for the states I was initially interested in and plugged each of them into localshell.com. At the time you could configure it to get up to 25 Stations within X mileage. I would copy the information down and do another search, then another, then another. All of a sudden, I received a message saying that my ISP was blocked due to too many downloads. I switched to my other ISP and continued working, but somewhat slower. The next thing I knew, they had changed the search page and no matter which ISP I used, and no matter what search criteria I used (ie, address, City, zip, etc.), it comes up can't find. My guess is that since I had requested information from them and had received no response from them, they decided to monitor me. Results = I can't get there from here.

I just tried a search using zip code 36352 (my zip which should have several stations within a 25 mile radius) and received the following"

Results: No pages found

No results were found using your query '36352 '.
We can match your query to words in our database.

Did you mean '36352 '?

I then did a query on Dothan, AL (should have several stations within the city) and received the following:

Results: No pages found

No results were found using your query 'Dothan, AL '.
We can match your query to words in our database.

Did you mean 'Dothan, AL '?

It would be interesting to know if anyone else has this problem. I gave up.

Curt

Most commercial sites despise 'bots, web crawlers and spiders mining their data and as Curt was continually pulling data from the site they classified it as a 'bot search and blocked the address.

Hi a_user. Thanks for the insight as to why I was blocked. I didn't know that they had names like that for people like me. I have been called much worse more times than I care to remember. Web crawler and spider I understand, but I can't figgure out BOT.

For the record, I do not even attempt to get information from or about Shell anymore. I will work with what I have for my own use. If it is determined that the POI factory would like to use the info, it will be readily available.

Curt

BOT = short for ROBOT

And yeah, most website owners really frown upon any sort of spidering or scraping.

It's not cool.

Yes, Sheetz does have POI files on their website.

I must confess. I do like to scrape off the info from company websites for data for my GPS. But sometimes that is just the easiest way for me to do get the info. Plus I get to do a bit of programming (don't want to forget about it totally). I still haven't been blocked doing it, although I have been expecting it to happen. I have not published any of the files I created this way, since then I would probably need to ask the company for permission before doing so.

Some of the data retrieved from the company websites needs to be checked and corrected before you use it. From some that have maps of the locations you can scrape to get the coordinates, and at times the coordinates are not just geocoded but actually points to the POI.

JCA