API for getting business hours at a location?

Question

Are there any APIs that will provide the hours of operation for a business at a particular location? Google Places, SimpleGeo, and Yelp don\'t seem to expose it. If not, is th

Answer 1

You may want to contact DNB and see if they have an offering since they are the prime source of business information: http://www.dnb.com

Just because they do not offer it as a product publicly does not mean that they cannot build a service to provide what you need.

Answer 2

Do you have any news on this thread?

I stumbled upon hoursmap.com trying to solve this, and even e-mailed them, but no response so far.

A scraper may be the best we can do, at least until features requiring business hours find more momentum.

As far as the need to handle siesta times, I believe you can handle this, worst case by writing something like "open between 9-12 and 14-18 on each weekday." I don't think that's a show stopper by any means.

Perhaps Yahoo! Pipes with some scraping is the way to go.

Please let us know if you've been able to make progress.

Answer 3

The Yelp and Facebook API's will often list opening times for local businesses. A company can put it on their page. But its kinda luck of the draw as to wheter or not the times are there.

Check out graph.facebook.com www.facebook.com/developers and http://www.yelp.com/developers/documentation

Answer 4

hat will provide the hours of operation for a business at a particular location

Are you sure business hours are standardized at least in one country? In Russia we have plenty of varieties. My primary bank works from 09-00 till 20-00. Another one near to my work closes at 19. The shop I buy food from is 24h, another one also with food closes at 22-00.

I don't think you can have an API like that.

Answer 5

Using YQL and JSONP you could gather the data yourself if the API doesn't exist yet.

http://paul.donnelly.org/2009/07/08/yql-and-jsonp-x/

http://developer.yahoo.com/yql/guide/yql-code-examples.html#sdk_yql

Answer 6

I'm currently investigating Simple Geo's support for annotations as a way to add this info to their Places API. It makes it DIY, but the docs talk about public annotations so maybe operating hours can be crowd sourced.

I'll follow up as I learn more.