Open post to GPS engineers

Often a custom POI file is generated from info on the company web site and may not have the hours of operation. The second point is the POI file itself. Most of the files are in CSV format which means everything from street address, city, state, post code, phone and now hours of operation would have to be dumped into the fourth field. This isn't as big a problem with GPX as it has separate fields for both comments and description, but consistent formatting from the various sources and maintainers is.

That sounds good on the surface but I'm afraid that it wouldn't work out in practice. Most folks don't update their maps very often, if at all, and add in the fact that it might take Garmin several years to get updated info into their POIs. So the info on hours of operation will probably be out dated. Then you would have folks griping about incorrect data.

One solution would be for you to build your own custom POI files using the GPX format. Then you could list hours of operation in the notes. The GPS still wouldn't be able to filter them but you could read the info off the screen. If you do this, please post them here.

mwbritt, I understand what you are after. I myself have urged others to create POI files for pharmacies that are open 24 hour a day.

Were your comments directed at Garmin/Navteq engineers, or to the many fine "engineers" on this site?

For files that I really need hours of operation, I have taken a CSV file from here and recreated it as a GPX file and included the hours of operation in there for my own custom POI, along with other information I need. Sometimes I have included that information on a CSV file in the 4th column including address, phone no, and hours of operation. I did that for some of the banks I go to.

You'd also use a little common sense. And if you know the phone number, you'd call before going there.

I created a little file a while ago for affinity cards and your question got me thinking. Why not have a similar type of file that lists the common hourse of operations for national companies such as friendly's, or smittys or crackle barrel?

Sort of like an information dbase as opposed to a poi file.....hmmmm

Hi J.,

I was mainly posting this to what ever manufacturer engineers may be reading.

I certainly hope that this would never be implemented. Listing the normal hours of operation in the data might be nice (although a lot to ask of Garmin, I would rather see them include "new" stores that have been open over four years when they include other members of the same chain in the same city, or remove all of the non-sense POI locations that are really just some private address that has no public storefront). But as a "feature" to hide the POI after it has supposedly closed for the day, it could be a real nuisance. Ignoring the obvious problem that factory POIs are extremely out of date and a location may have changed it's hours, this would make it very difficult to find POI locations for special sales such as "Midnight Madness" or perhaps even seasonal Christmas shopping. If the POI contained hours of operation that could be viewed, that would be great, a user could choose to trust it or not as they see fit. But making locations "vanish" based on hours of operation could be quite undesirable.

This is a good idea, but many places alter their hours throughout the year. Unless there is some way to continually monitor and update the changing hours of operation, then the data would not be 100% accurate.