🐾 snuffel-data

Open data pipeline behind Snuffel, a directory that helps dog owners in 🇳🇱 🇧🇪 🇫🇷 🇩🇪 🇵🇱 🇨🇿 find independent vets, groomers, shops, trainers, dog hotels and dog play areas.

This repository collects and publishes the data; the site itself lives elsewhere. Everything runs on GitHub Actions and writes static files to Azure Storage:

Workflow	When	Output
data	monthly (3rd), or manually	places/manifest.json + 0.25° cells, chains.json
tiles	quarterly, or manually	tiles/snuffel.pmtiles (Protomaps basemap)
test	every push / PR	unit tests

Places

tools/build-places.js reads Geofabrik country extracts (filtered with osmium) and keeps every vet, animal hospital, pet shop, groomer, boarding kennel, dog trainer, shelter, dog park and off-leash area, plus parks whose name marks them as a dog field (hondenweide, Hundewiese, caniparc, wybieg dla psów, psí louka). Classification rules: lib/classify.js.

Independent or chain-owned?

Acquired practices usually keep their own name, so a name tells you little. lib/chains.js combines evidence, strongest first:

1. Manual review — tools/chain-overrides.json
2. The groups' own clinic lists — every clinic page of AniCura (13 countries), VetPartners, Medivet, CVS, Linnaeus, Vets for Pets, Sevetys, Mon Véto, Univet, Argos, Kivet, Tierarzt Plus Partner, Vetopia (AT), VetTrust, Animalia and Ca' Zampa, matched on phone number and on the clinic's own website where the group links it; Evidensia Belgium's practice list, matched on website
3. The clinic's own website — it redirects to a group domain, names the group as legal entity or in its copyright line, says it is part of a group, or links to the group's own terms / privacy pages (tools/scan-websites.js)
4. OpenStreetMap tags — name / brand / operator, or a brand:wikidata chain tag

Merely mentioning a group is never enough: independent clinics routinely send out-of-hours emergencies to a chain hospital. Those cases are kept for human review only. tests/scan.test.js pins real examples.

Crawling is polite: robots.txt is honoured (evidensia.de and evidensia.pl are therefore not crawled), one request per site at a time, ~1 request/s for the groups' own sites.

Groups we recognise (ownership as researched October 2026)

Group	Owner	Main countries
AniCura	Mars, Inc.	most of Europe
IVC Evidensia (incl. Caressa)	EQT (private equity)	most of Europe
Linnaeus	Mars, Inc.	UK
VetPartners (DierenDokters, Swissvet, Vetersalud…)	BC Partners (PE)	UK, ES, FR, IT, NL, IE, DE, PT, CH
Medivet	CVC Capital Partners (PE)	UK, DE, ES
CVS Group	listed (LSE)	UK
Pets at Home Vet Group (Vets for Pets, Companion Care)	Pets at Home plc (listed)	UK
Sevetys	Eurazeo (PE) with vet partners	FR
Mon Véto	vet-owned majority, Ardian (PE) minority	FR, BE
Univet	InfraVia (PE)	FR, BE
Argos Vétérinaire	G Square (PE)	FR
UNAVETS	Oaktree Capital (PE)	ES, PT
Kivet / Clinicanimal	Iskaypet (pet retail)	ES, PT
Tierarzt Plus Partner	Inflexion (PE)	DE
Vetopia (VetGruppen, Empet, Svenska Veterinärgruppen, Helvetiera, Veterinaria, Vireä)	Axcel (PE) with employees	DK, NO, SE, CH, AT, FI, DE, UK
VetTrust	Porterhouse Group (family office)	CH
Gruppo Animalia	Charme Capital (PE)	IT
Ca' Zampa / BluVet	Nextalia (PE; disputed)	IT
LuxVet	INVL Baltic Sea Growth Fund (PE)	PL

Group names that are also ordinary words or street names (Linnaeus, Argos, Kivet, Univet, Animalia, Medivet) are matched by website domain only.

Something wrong? Open an issue with the clinic and a source; corrections go into tools/chain-overrides.json and are live after the next data run.

Opening hours from the clinics' own websites

About a third of the vets in OpenStreetMap have no opening_hours, so an emergency search can't tell "closed" from "unknown". For vets without hours that do have a website, tools/scan-hours.js reads up to three pages of that site (robots.txt honoured) and takes:

1. structured data (schema.org openingHoursSpecification / openingHours) when the site has it;
2. otherwise the text around "openingstijden", "spreekuur", weekday names… goes to a small Azure OpenAI model that answers in OSM opening_hours syntax or null;
3. emergency information: 24/7 emergency care at the clinic itself, or an out-of-hours line to the on-call vet.

Every answer must pass a strict grammar check (only plain weekday/time rules) or it is dropped. Unchanged pages reuse last month's answer, so the AI only sees changes. The results are published as hours.json and added to the places as separate snuffel:opening_hours / snuffel:emergency fields: OpenStreetMap's own hours always win, and the site and app label these as "according to their own website". Nothing is written to OpenStreetMap automatically; each place links to the OSM editor so people can correct the source. Countries: the HOURS_COUNTRIES variable (default nl).

Shared core

lib/ (chain detection, category rules, opening hours) and i18n/ (29 language packs) are the single source for the website and the Snuffel app. Both keep identical copies; their CI fails when a copy differs from this repository.

Map tiles

tools/tiles-region.js builds the outline of the six countries (Natural Earth, public domain); the tiles workflow cuts that region out of the latest Protomaps planet build with pmtiles extract.

Running locally

node tests/places.test.js && node tests/chains.test.js && node tests/scan.test.js
node tools/build-chains.js                 # official lists -> dist/chains.json
node tools/scan-websites.js nl             # needs tools/.cache/osm-vets-nl.json (from build-places add, or Overpass)
node tools/evaluate-chains.js nl           # what is flagged, and by which signal
node tools/scan-hours.js nl                # opening hours from clinic websites -> tools/hours-nl.json

Credentials

The data and tiles workflows need:

• variable AZURE_STORAGE_ACCOUNT — the storage account name
• variables AZURE_CLIENT_ID, AZURE_TENANT_ID, AZURE_SUBSCRIPTION_ID — the Entra app "snuffel-data-publish". Workflows sign in with GitHub OIDC (no stored key or SAS): its federated credential only trusts this repo's publish environment (main branch only), and its only role is Storage Blob Data Contributor on the data and tiles containers.
• secrets AZURE_OPENAI_ENDPOINT, AZURE_OPENAI_KEY and variable AZURE_OPENAI_DEPLOYMENT — for the opening-hours step (without them only structured data is used)

Workflows run only on schedule or manual dispatch, never on pull requests from forks, so secrets are not exposed.

Licence

• Places and derived data: © OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database License (ODbL) 1.0.
• Basemap: Protomaps (BSD 3-Clause / ODbL).
• Country outlines: Natural Earth (public domain).
• Code: © Sander de Wit, all rights reserved unless stated otherwise.