Food in the UK

There are some tutorials on this site on creating POI files that will be a tremendous help for you. I would suggest you look through them before beginning.

As far as what to include, I would look to do it simply by concentrating on a single chain or brand of grocer or restaurant. To be of the most use, I would include all locations throughout the UK and Northern Ireland. I also would begin by doing the most popular and/or largest chains individually.

Another factor is your target device as the formats for different brands of devices are built differently. As an example, Garmin uses a 4 field CSV file for their simplest entry and a more fully featured file built in HTML called a GPX file. If you are using a PC running Windows as your development platform, there is a program called Extra POI Editor which requires Windows to run that will build either a GPX format file, a CSV format file for Garmin and will output the different formats for some of the other popular brands such as Tom-Tom.

Box Car has given you some good thoughts.

I would be interested in just what you will be able to obtain from the Food Standards Agency (UK).I am assuming that you would be able to get some kind of "file" from them.

To help others understand what you have, you might start with detailing the file schemas.

Everything's at http://ratings.food.gov.uk/open-data/en-GB - basically you get business name, address, type (one of 14), geodata (usually, though not for e.g. mobile caterers), and hygiene rating details.

Name and address are not consistently entered so it needs a bit of cleverness in processing to sort them into categories.

And there are definitely some missing - my nearest branch of Waitrose, for example.

(Later) I've uploaded the Waitrose one. Converting the data is pretty easy; the other major supermarkets are ready to go.