Swiss Toy Shops

A dataset of the locations of toy shops around Switzerland.

Last update: 3.12.2023

• CSV: swiss-toy-shops.csv Download (67 KB) / Preview
• GeoJSON: swiss-toy-shops.geojson Download (897 KB) / Preview
• Data Package: datapackage.json Download (21 KB)

License: Open Database License (ODbL)

Method

OpenStreetMap data was exported with a Nominatim query into QGIS, cropped with swiss-maps to country borders, visualized and exported to GeoJSON and CSV formats.

Story

On the tradition of gift-giving, the search for toy data, and a map for finding your way to playful presents during the holiday season.

Winter festivities are associated in our culture with gift-giving and families, a long standing European tradition - at least 200 years old, according to historians (see Wachelder 2013). This winter, millions of children will hope to find shiny toys in a sock or underneath a tree. We may well ask, where do the toys come from? And as this is an Open Data Advent, we of course would like to ask the question with data.

In 2023, the main open data portals in Switzerland do not have many answers. The only dataset that is directly related to toys that we could find, the "Special Collections" of the Swiss National Museum (Repräsentative Auswahl aus der Sammlung „Spezialsammlungen“ des Schweizerischen Nationalmuseums"). This was among the collections presented at our 2018 Open Cultural Data Hackathon. It contains pictures and references to a museum collection of toys: not really the kind of thing we imagine kids getting excited about.

Points of interest

So, where could we find toys? Oh, sure .. toy shops. A quick query of the shop=toys tag on OpenStreetMap gave us the data for over 200 locations in Switzerland that, apparently, sell toys. We are not sure if they are fit for children or for work, but there you have it - a highly accessible bit of open data that might just help you find that last minute present for your loved one!

Once we know the tag, we can export the data with a Nominatim query, that lets us download a GeoJSON file and open it in a program like QGIS. There were actually over 700 items, since the bounding box was larger than Switzerland. We an use the swiss-maps tool to download just the polygon of the country's borders, at which point the QGIS crop tool (Vector > Geoprocessing > Clip) to filter out just the locations we need for the map. The result:

If you would like to get a copy of just the dataset, you can get it from a GitHub Gist in GeoJSON or CSV format. Please note that it is under the Open Database License (ODbL).

Looking further

As a fun exercise, you could try to do the same thing with the shop=robot tag 🤖

Have we really answered the question, though? These are shops - not factories, not workshops. The closest tag we could think of was craft=toys, however there were no results at all in Switzerland.

The dataset 21st Century Swiss video games contains some potential stocking-stuffers, but is also not related to toys and their production.

Did you know?

By the way, it is a fun thing to note that the French term for dataset literally means a "play of data" - Jeu de données. So every time you do a search on Open Data in French, you are looking for games ;-)

More data

With further searching of the 'net, we came across the Spielwarenverband, or Toy manufacturer's association of Switzerland. On their website, you can find a convenient download page with an exportable list of dozens of manufacturers from around the country. If you click around, you will even find a CSV format option. On their newsroom section you can also find lots of insightful statistics about the toy-making industry. However, as their Copyright notice asserts, the association expressly forbids making use of this data without their consent (auto-translation):

The copyright and all other rights to content, images, photos or other files on this website belong exclusively to the legal entity Spielwaren Verband Schweiz or the specifically named rights holders. The written consent of the copyright holder must be obtained in advance for the reproduction of any elements.

How to contribute

• Create an account at OpenStreetMap and follow the instructions to add more shops to the map and tag them appropriately. Then ping @loleg to update this dataset.
• Look for more sources of toy shop data, such as the Phone book or a search engine.
• Try to convince the Toy association to open things up a notch. You know, for kids!