Friday, November 09, 2007
Reference USA: New database
We have added Reference USA as a new database -- it contains detailed information on more than 14 million U.S. businesses, 210 million U.S. residents, 855,000 U.S. health care providers, 1.5 million Canadian businesses, and 12 million Canadian households, and let's you map them out, which is pretty cool.
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Just to add a few details to Mike's post - this database is much more comprehensive than the DB Million Dollar Directory - 14 million business records vs 1.5 million. When I gave my Intro to GIS presentation, I demonstrated how to map businesses from the D and B in ArcGIS. I extracted 17 records for Radio Shack from that directory for Manhattan, and plotted them using Lat and Long coordinates. When I do that same query in the RefUSA, I get 41 records. A lot more than D and B.
You can use RefUSA to get lists of businesses by name, location, and classification codes. You can export the list out as a csv file that you can bring into Excel. You can only grab 25 records at a time, but it's a simple matter to copy and paste them into one spreadsheet after you download them (unless you're working with a list of hundreds). You get lots of attribute info if you download the detailed records - sales, employees, sq footage, lat and long, etc.
One thing to note - if you search by place and try to grab all records for a certain business in New York, the results will give you New York County (Manhattan) and not the entire city. If you want the boroughs, you have to search for them by name. This was the case in the D and B as well - NYC is peculiar, as it's the only city in the US made up of more than one county.
RefUSA has added a lot of new features besides the simple directory listing that are worth looking at. At some point in the future, I'll put together a step-by-step tutorial for mapping the records...
- Frank
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