

Ask HN: Where can I obtain location based db for all the schools/univs? - expertcs

I am developing an app where I need to provide a list of all the schools, universities, and training centers based on location. Are there databases available with such information that I can obtain for free or paid? Any help in general for obtaining such information will be appreciated.
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bigsassy
The TIGER data set may have what you're looking for. It's essentially
government data collected during the Census. In it's technical documentation,
it has special MTFCC codes for Universities as well as Schools/Academys that
you could query on (WHERE MTFCC IN ('K2540', 'K2543')). See section 6-155
here:

[http://www.census.gov/geo/www/tiger/tgrshp2010/TGRSHP10AF.pd...](http://www.census.gov/geo/www/tiger/tgrshp2010/TGRSHP10AF.pdf)

Take this with a grain of salt, but I believe you'd want to pull the data out
of the following shape files:

ftp://ftp2.census.gov/geo/tiger/TIGER2010/POINTLM/

These files are brand spanking new, and in fact not all the data has been
added yet (5 states are missing). The entire dataset for 2010 will probably be
up by the end of the month.

You can see the layout of the shape file here (see Landmark (Point) Shape File
Layout in section 6-104):

[http://www.census.gov/geo/www/tiger/tgrshp2010/TGRSHP10AA.pd...](http://www.census.gov/geo/www/tiger/tgrshp2010/TGRSHP10AA.pdf)

For what it's worth, it looks like the TIGER dataset also has school district
info, which could allow you to lookup a person's school(s) based on their
address (reverse geolocate their address and use the coordinates to query
districts where the point exists).

If that doesn't work out (or it's missing some data) you could try looking at
these websites:

<http://gos2.geodata.gov/wps/portal/gos>

<http://www.data.gov/catalog/geodata>

<http://nationalatlas.gov/>

<http://simplegeo.com/>

<http://market.weogeo.com/>

<http://data.geocomm.com/>

<http://geocommons.com/>

