Getting Started

This doc serves as a walkthrough of what to expect when partnering with Factual and ingesting Factual's Places data. More details on each topic can be found in the other Places docs, and helpful links are provided below.

Data Products and Attributes

• Our core Places data features twenty-five different attributes for POIs. Some examples are factual_id, name, address, locality, latitude, and longitude.
• In addition to our core attributes, Factual offers five classes of extended attributes that can be licensed at an additional cost:
  • Restaurants
  • Hotels
  • Healthcare Providers
  • PlaceRank
  • Crosswalk
• When evaluating or using Factual Places in a production environment, it is strongly suggested that you apply an existence score threshold to filter out closed, duplicate, and junky records. For more information, please see the doc on Factual's existence attribute.
• For FAQ, please refer to the Data and Attributes section of our Places FAQ.

Data Delivery

• Each client will receive a personal, password protected Dropbox folder where their data is deposited. We also offer to deliver data via FTP/SFTP.
• Factual will reach out to inquire which email addresses should have access to the Dropbox folder. Upon confirmation of payment, the Dropbox folder will be shared with those email addresses. Each address will subsequently receive an email notification granting them access. Afterwards, clients can proceed to download the data file(s). Additionally, clients can request a password protected link for the Dropbox Folder.
• Our data files are .tsv format and encoded with UTF-8. Fields are delimited by the tab character.
• Each file is separated by country. The sizes of the files can vary due to various factors such as country size. Many of our country files contain over a million records.
  • Please do not try to use Excel to download the files as the files are simply too large. Do not load the entire file into memory, and do not try to view with an editor. Instead, use head, tail, sed, awk, grep, and other command-line utilities. These are all available for Windows at http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net.
  • Additionally, the Mac version of Excel cannot view many of our non-ascii characters
• Each country file will contain a header that specifies the included attributes
• Factual data is primarily updated in build cycles that occur roughly once a month. Upon a new build being released, new country files will be automatically delivered to you and will replace the older files.
• If you license any/all of our extended attributes (see above in Data Products and Attributes for more info), the following will occur in terms of data delivery in the applicable countries:
  • PlaceRank and Crosswalk attributes will be appended as additional columns in the regular country data files
  • Restaurants, Hotels, and Healthcare Providers attributes will be delivered as separate files.
• For FAQ, please refer to the Data Delivery section of our Places FAQ.