Accessible place data is critical for businesses, consumers, and application developers. Businesses want to be found by new customers, who need to know accurate locations, hours of operation, and other information about the places they want to visit. Application developers need affordable data without onerous legal restrictions or complicated deal terms.
Currently, the best place data is very restrictive, expensive, and controlled by a small handful of companies. Quality varies globally, with data concentrated in the biggest markets and poor coverage elsewhere. Even the highest-quality data isnt fresh enough: who hasnt searched online for a store to find it closed or with different hours?
Creating and maintaining a dataset like this is a very difficult problem. Restaurants open and close, a store changes hours, a doctor moves her practice across town, or a public building might close for temporary renovations.
We are developing a protocol that will incentivize the collection and maintenance of data for the places people care about worldwide. To solve this problem, we need to build a system where anyone can freely participate for appropriate incentives. The data must be open and accessible to anyone who wants to use it. And the system must be permanent, not tied to any specific company (including ours!)
