Entreprendre Sherbrooke

Entreprendre Sherbrooke is a para-municipal economic development organization. They make available a dataset with about 4900 businesses and organizations present in the Sherbrooke area. This page describes the data and the different steps needed to import them according to the Import guidelines.

Directory of businesses in the Sherbrooke area

The data is available here under a CC0 license. In order to show how it can be processed/edited and to facilitate discussion on the import process, an record example is described below. The file format is .csv. File content is in French but definitions are provided here in English.

[1] The North American Industry Classification System defines the mix_id, scian_categorie and scian_principal attributes. These attributes are used to help finding adequate tags for each record.

License Compatibility

Entreprendre Sherbrooke has made its dataset available with a CC0 license. They own all of its contents except for coordinates. These coordinates are derived from data belonging to the Ville de Sherbrooke (the City) which distributes its data with a CC-BY 4.0 license. Entreprendre Sherbrooke is currently seeking an agreement with the City to share these coordinates with OpenStreetMap. Until then, the import cannot be done.

Data Analysis

Import process

When records of a given NAICS code are ready to be imported, they are converted to an .osm file using FME, and opened in JOSM as an import separate layer.

For each object of the import layer:

• upload the surrounding content from OSM in an osm layer
• if the object exists in the osm layer then update the existing osm feature:
  • if the osm feature is a node then:
    • update the node with object tags.
    • adjust the node location if required.
  • else if the osm feature has a building=* tag then:
    • remove the building=yes tag from the object.
    • copy the object to the osm layer on its actual location.
    • remove osm feature tags that are duplicated in object.
  • else the osm feature is not a building, so:
    • copy the object to the osm layer on its actual location.
    • remove osm feature tags that are duplicated in object.
• else copy the object to the osm layer on its actual location.

Once each object is transferred to the osm layer:

• check the osm layer for errors with JOSM validator and correct them.
• upload the osm layer to OSM database.

The process aims to create nodes with imported businesses. These businesses start, stop or move but the buildings in which they are located do not change much. Keeping businesses up to date should be easier with nodes than with anything else. Once imported, the identifiers of the nodes will be kept in order to link them to the records of the Entreprendre Sherbrooke dataset. Since this organization updates its dataset on a quarterly basis, this could potentially help keeping OSM updated at the same frequency.

(Work in progress)...

Current Records Tagging

This section aims to provide and discuss tags for each business associated with a given NAICS code. A review of each record, based on local knowledge/web search validation, must be performed to properly tag each business.
Current osm_tags is the result of a first attempt. You are welcome to add or modify any of these tags.

(Work in progress)...