Key Takeaways
- Location intelligence expands beyond traditional places by capturing smaller but strategically important points such as ATMs and transit stops.
- Point POIs fill a critical data gap where physical boundaries do not exist but location context still matters.
- Adding these non-polygonal locations creates a more complete and realistic view of how spaces are used.
- A single dataset can now support deeper analysis across site selection, urban planning, and network optimization.
- Combining point POIs with existing place data strengthens spatial analysis without adding complexity to workflows.
Since we first launched point POIs, our customers have begged for more categories and geographies. Now, we offer hundreds of thousands of new point POIs to facilitate your investment research, site selection, trade area analysis, and more.
Getting data on non-traditional places (locations without defined polygon boundaries) used to be near impossible. To address this gap, in July 2021 we introduced point-only POIs. Point-only POIs are places without any associated geometry that still are relevant to organizations and their analytics, such as ATMs, kiosks, and transit stops. Our July release included 182,000 point POIs, and since then we’ve continued to build our database. Our September release of Core Places includes 746,953 POIs in the US, Canada, and Great Britain, providing users with a more complete view of the world around them and enhancing their critical analyses.
What Are Point POIs?
Non-traditional POI locations such as ATMs, electrical vehicle charging stations, kiosks, transit stops, and vending machines may lack structural boundaries, but are mapped using x and y coordinates in the point POI dataset. Learn more about them in our data schema.
How Can I Get Point POIs?
SafeGraph’s new point POIs are an extension of SafeGraph Places data, which provides baseline information for every record in the product suite, including location name, address, lat/long, category, brand, and more. This means that customers receive every column in SafeGraph’s base schema for point-only POI rows, which can easily be appended to Places in order to enhance use cases including investment research, site selection, trade area analysis, urban planning, and network planning. This is just a fraction of all the potential use cases for point POIs, as the opportunities to use point POIs for spatial analysis purposes are endless.
Interested in adding point POIs to your current POI dataset? Contact your SafeGraph Customer Success Manager, or reach out to get a quote.
FAQ’s
1. What are point POIs?
Point POIs are locations without defined physical boundaries, such as ATMs, kiosks, and transit stops, represented using latitude and longitude coordinates.
2. How are point POIs different from regular POIs?
Regular POIs often include building footprints or polygons, while point POIs only have coordinate data without defined shapes.
3. Why are point POIs important for analysis?
They capture important locations that influence movement, accessibility, and decision-making but are often missing from traditional datasets.
4. What are common use cases for point POIs?
They are used in site selection, trade area analysis, urban planning, and infrastructure or network planning.
5. Can point POIs be combined with other location datasets?
Yes. Point POIs can be easily integrated with broader places data to enrich analysis and provide more complete insights.