February-2023 Release Notes (02/02/23)
Welcome to the February 2023 Release Notes! 💘
Our hearts are set on steady coverage increases and clarifying the boundaries tagged to our Places 🌐.
(2023-01-27/1674810003 shipped on 2023-02-02)
Highlights
- +148K new POIs across the globe 🌍
- 13.9M POIs with improved
regiondefinitions - New
census_codecolumn for Places in US and CA 🔢
Enhancements
SafeGraph is delivering more POI each month in countries around the world. This month, SG Places has a grand total of 41,769,882, including POI with or without geometry, closed POI, and parking lots. This is a net increase of 148,468 places from last month, including:
- +75,499 in US 🇺🇸
- +23,959 in AU 🇦🇺
- +23,159 in GB 🇦🇺
- +18,264 in DE 🇩🇪
- +12,596 in IT 🇮🇹
Of course, you can always visit our Places Summary Stats to find more details on our continued growth.
Improved Global Regions
We're now aligning with a widely adopted standard in the geospatial community to determine region in each country. This ensures a consistent understanding of geographical units across countries.
Implementing this standard resulted in significant region value changes. In total, ~13.9M POIs outside of US, CA, and GB saw a region value change; some are casing/naming cleanups while others reflect an entirely new administrative boundary. Visit our docs for deeper details.
Census Codes
By popular demand, we added census_code as a new Places column in US and CA 🎉. This column shows the ID of the most granular unit area where a country's census bureau collects and reports population/demographic statistics. In the US, this ID is known as the "FIPs" (Federal Information Processing Standard) code, which shows the full hierarchy of census statistical areas from county down to census block group. In Canada, we are using dissemination area. See our Places docs for deeper details.
Census codes are very useful join keys into datasets aggregated at census reported areas including demographics and other government reported data. Want to see this column in your next delivery? Please reach out to your customer success manager. Is there a country missing census_code you'd like to see populated? Let us know!
Brands
We've added a grand total of 186 brands across 103 countries. Some of the highlights:
Notable brands 🌍
- eni (SG_BRAND_52959cc00262e2a8) with 5,031 POI
- Australia Post Post Office (SG_BRAND_055303a03b8e5910) with 4,312 POI
- Intesa San Paolo (SG_BRAND_d3e3378a8a8cea40) with 2,809 POI
👀 Are we missing a brand or country? 👀 Please let us know here!
Brand Openings and Closings
- We rely on POI metadata to track store openings and closings, and we are especially interested in understanding open/close dates for branded POIs. It can take more than a month to infer open/close dates, so we report brand open/close metrics on a one month delay.
- In this release, we flagged 1,729 brands with at least one store closure in December 2022 and 1,978 brands with at least one store opening in December 2022:
Learn more about our open/close columns here
Categories
The POI we've added this month span a wide range of categories, including the following additions:
- POI with geometry:
- Lessors of Residential Buildings and Dwellings (531110) with +34,404 POI
- Commercial Banking (522110) with +14,116 POI
- Supermarkets and Other Grocery (except Convenience) Stores (445110) with +14,046 POI
- Point-only POI:
- Couriers and Express Delivery Services (492110) with +35,515 POI
- Vending Machine Operators (454210) with +15,393 POI
Drops ⬇️
- We are ingesting many sources and due to source changes and processing changes, Placekeys do drop over time. In this release, we dropped 140,358 Placekeys (106,215 branded and 34,143 non-branded).