Introduction

Welcome to the Central Index, the global data exchange for local business information. We want this API to help you build amazing applications, and at the same time help us build the most accurate and trusted source of local data in the world.

How our data is organised

In the Central Index world a local business (your local dry cleaner, say, or a nearby coffee shop) is called an entity. And every entity has a large number of attributes, which we call objects. An entity will normally have at least four core objects...

• A name  (e.g. "Gladys's Hair Salon")
• An address (e.g. "3 Meath Street, Dublin, Dublin 8" )
• A telephone number (e.g. "085 1313100")
• A business category (e.g. "Unisex Hairdresser")

... but it can have many more: website URLs, fax numbers, descriptions, email addresses, images, logos, videos, opening hours. We hope to keep adding more and more attributes to our entities as time goes by.

Each object can have multiple fields. For example a website object not only has the site URL, but also a website description paramenter and a display URL parameter, all of which you can use depending how you want to display information.

What you can do with our API

Our API allows you to:

• Perform national or local searches for a supplied search term
• Perform national or local searches for a supplied company name
• Perform searches for advertisers that match the supplied tags and location terms
• Retrieve individual businesses
• Enable your users to report incorrect data 
• Enable your users to Add new entities to the Central Index
• Auto-suggest category and locations from our database of categories and locations

Other API calls are available for premium customers. 

Our documentation will show you how to get an API key; how to do searches and retrieve entities; what sort of data points you can expect to find in the different objects and how to enage your community in adding entities and correcting data in the Central Index.

We welcome your feedback, email us on developers@centralindex.com