For the past five years, we’ve worked tirelessly to build points of interest (POI) data for places that data scientists care about. This started as places where people spent time or money in the US, and has since expanded to include industrial locations, apartment complexes, and ATMs in the US, Canada, and UK. But this month, we are proud to announce SafeGraph is launching a massive effort to expand its global POI dataset.
Introducing: SafeGraph Global Places. Global Places provides every column and attribute from SafeGraph Places, for any brand anywhere in the world. As of September 2021, Global Places includes over 380 brands in 188 countries - and we are only getting started.
We first built Places data in the US because we tried to build a different dataset that required POI data, and we couldn’t find a reliable source. Once we fulfilled that need in the US, Canada, and UK, we decided to set our sights on the entire world.
The world is continuing to globalize and more and more organizations need to make strategic decisions about where to invest their time, money and resources both domestically in the US, as well as abroad. For example, if you are a large retailer or restaurant chain, you are investing in many different geographies globally. And it’s important to have a global strategy backed by reliable data.
However, POI data can vary greatly from country to country with respect to its availability and level of quality. Each individual country may have a local vendor for POI data, but aggregating or stitching them together can be a very difficult and time consuming task for a data science team. Add in powering models with differing data schemas, and analyzing global places becomes a major endeavor.
Global Places data enables users to easily compare and contrast markets with confidence. With one data schema for all worldwide POIs, Global Places drastically reduces time spent preparing and cleaning data for analytics and ingestion into data science models. SafeGraph’s proven methodology for building POI data now delivers the accuracy, precision, and freshness required for reliable analytics at a global scale.
“We are thrilled to launch the Global Places dataset and bring these highly sought-after POIs to the market. Data scientists from large corporations, small organizations, and academic institutions alike have been asking for a truly global POI dataset, and we’re committed to continuously increasing our coverage to help power their analytics.” - Stu Kendall, Head of Product Marketing
Global Places data includes attributes on each branded POI including:
And more - view the full schema here.
There are endless use cases for POI data, but we tend to see Global POIs used for site selection, competitive intelligence, and investment research, mainly by:
Explore Global Places coverage here:
While we’ve expanded globally, we’ve maintained our fierce commitment to quality and transparency. SafeGraph data has a 95+% brand recall verified with first-party data, and we always share our schema publicly at docs.safegraph.com.
Want to dive deeper? Reach out for a free consultation with our data experts to see how Global Places data can transform your organization.
