We’ve been slaving over this for months - but we finally finished the category work on iBegin Source.

I’ll admit (for current and future clients) - we screwed up a bit. While the ‘business listing’ <---> ‘category’ relationship was accurate, the actual category names were slightly off. A common issue was sometimes we had a category end with ‘(Manufacturers)’ and other times ‘ - Manufacturers’ and other times ‘ - Manufacturing’. All three were the same, but the lack of normalization was an issue we made a mistake on.

It has taken a while, but it is finally ready for consumption. I’ll be sending out a mass-email tomorrow, but for current (and future) clients, the important links:

Category updates: Old » New
Raw list of category updates
New master list of categories

We started off with 11,094 categories, and ended up with 10,432. 662 categories merged into existing categories - a 6% reduction. A total of 5177 categories were affected (though this does include minor tweaks like the above mentioned ‘(Manufacturers)’ vs ‘ - Manufacturers’.

This is of course the start. While the databases are primed to support both the old and new category format simultaneously, we will have to modify the system to properly accomodate and generate files for each. And then we have to start selling the Canadian data. And work on super-categories. And sell super-categories. And re-design iBegin Source homepage. And move the listings to www.ibegin.com [so that source.ibegin.com = info on business data, and www.ibegin.com = actual listings]. All while continually improving our data (normalizations, franchise-lists, franchise info, listings from professional organizations and associations, etc).

Fun