SafeGraph Places

 SafeGraph Places  provides business listing and POI footprint data for every location where consumers can spend time or money in the U.S. and Canada. As of October 2020, that's over 6M places. We're big fans of machine learning and good ole fashion common sense to remove duplicates, assign categories, and determine the spatial relationships POIs have with one another.

SafeGraph's primary goal is to archive facts about the physical world, and we are hyper-focused on getting that right. We ingest thousands of data sources each month to ensure we have a fresh universe of metadata to build a places truth set.

 Core Places  is the baseline product which provides useful context about a place such as name, brand name, category, address,  placekey , centroid (lat/long), phone number, open hours, open date, close date, etc. See our  schema for details , and note that all column headers have been truncated to the first 10 characters in the web maps below (Ex:"safegraph_place_id" => "safegraph_").    See here for a mapping of the attributes displayed in the web maps to standard, non-truncated attributes .

Within Core Places,  categories    are extremely important as many use cases rely on accurate category assignments to filter for specific POIs. We align with the  NAICS (North American Industry Classification System)  taxonomy developed by the U.S. Census Bureau to assign a "naics_code" to each place.

NAICS codes are hierarchical; in other words, the first 2 digits describe a very general category, while additional digits describe increasingly specific categories. The "top_category" field provides a description of the first 4-digits of a naics_code, and the "sub_category" field provides a description of the entire 6-digit naics_code.

However, not all NAICS codes are fit for purpose, and some sub-categories seriously lack precision. For example, within the "722" NAICS family, "Full-Service Restaurants" is the sub-category description for a 6-digit NAICS code (722511). This is too broad to be useful, so we introduced " category_tags " to offer more detailed descriptions for all places within this NAICS family.

Other categories lacking precision?  Tell us where to build category_tags next. 

Browse Core Places symbolized by top_category in the Denver MSA below. Zoom-in to view category_tag labels where applicable.

SafeGraph updates data monthly to reflect store openings and store closures. For each opening and closure identified, we mark the date in the corresponding "closed_on" or "opened_on" column.  Learn more about how we track open/close dates here. 

The heat map below shows densities of all Places that have closed in the Denver MSA since we began tracking open/close dates (~July 2019 - present).

POI centroids (latitudes & longitudes) are useful, but understanding the shape and size of each place provides a deeper context about the spatial relationships places have with one another. For this reason, we strive to provide a "best fitting" polygon depicting the true footprint of each POI in Core Places. A polygon can range from a building footprint (or even a slice of a building footprint) to a massive shape containing parking lots, land, and several buildings within its bounds.

From these shapes, SafeGraph derives insightful metadata such as:

• "parent_safegraph_place_id" -- a flag showing the parent/child relationship when a place encompasses another place (also know as  spatial hierarchy )
• " polygon_class " -- indicates if one or many POIs call a distinct polygon home
• " enclosed " - indicates when a place encompasses another place completely indoors

Explore SafeGraph Core & Geometry data below to learn more about polygons.

Want to see this data at global scale? Us too! We're currently evaluating new markets to build SafeGraph Places in next - if you have an opinion,  we would love to hear it. 

In April 2021, we are excited to release our MVP version of Core Places and Geometry in the United Kingdom! Check out a sneak preview below!

Feeling inspired?  Visit our site  to explore at your own pace.