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January-2020 Release Notes

over 4 years ago by Ryan Fox Squire

SafeGraph's New Year's Resolution 2️⃣0️⃣2️⃣0️⃣ - Make SafeGraph data your favorite thing about coming to work.

Welcome to the January-2020 Places release notes (v2019-12-23/1577135031) shipped 2020-01-06.

Highlights

  • New Column Available: category_tags provides enhanced, high-resolution category information on Food & Drink Services POI, taking category-based analysis, visualization, and querying to the next level. Ask your SafeGraph rep to add category_tags to your deliveries, or try it out from the SafeGraph Data Bar.
  • SafeGraph Places now has 6,094,106 places in the United States and Canada (+14,833 from last release).
  • This month SG Patterns has 1,073,278,638 visits from 40,577,097 visitors (up +117,021,790 visits, +6,747,731 visitors from last month!). :christmas-tree: 🕎kinara :snowflake: :family: :gift: :chart-with-upwards-trend:
  • 101 new brands, such as Marathon (marathonbrand.com) with 5,688 US places.

Table of Contents:

Core Places and Brands

Enhancements - Core Places and Brands

  • Last month SG Places had 6,079,273 points-of-interest. This month SG Places has 6,094,106 points-of-interest (net + 14,833 places). These are +14,835 US Places and -2 CA places.
  • Enhanced Category Resolution. This is big. :+1:
    • First, we like NAICS because it is a government- and industry-standard used throughout the world to categorize businesses and points-of-interest. However, it has some shortcomings. For example, the 6-digit NAICS 722511 covers all "Full-Service Restaurants" under one code. This means that as far as NAICS is concerned, Le Bernardin :fish:, Ruth's Chris Steak House 🥩, and your local family-owned Chinese food restaurant 🍜 are all the same type of place. This is unsatisfying for SafeGraph, and for many SafeGraph customers, including anyone supporting local search, category-based visualizations, or competitive retail intelligence. Seemingly simple queries like "show me the nearest Mexican restaurants" are very difficult when the only category information available is the NAICS code.
    • Today we are super excited to launch category_tags as a major augmentation to the category information available in SafeGraph Core Places. category_tags is focused on providing more detailed category information for food-and-drink-related places. For POI with naics_code starting 722 ("Food Services and Drinking Places"), SafeGraph now provides a comma-separated list of human-readable "tags" forming a detailed description of the place. See below for some examples of the power of category_tags.
    • (For a full list of all possible category_tag values, see the Places Manual: Category Tags)
    • (For information on how this new column affects the column-order of your new deliveries, see the Places Manual: Column Ordering)
    • Examples of the new column category_tags:
location_namenaics_codetop_categorysub_categorycategory_tags (NEW)
Le Bernardin722511Restaurants and Other Eating PlacesFull-Service RestaurantsBar or Pub,Cocktail Lounge,Fine Dining,French Food,Late Night
Ruth's Chris Steakhouse722511Restaurants and Other Eating PlacesFull-Service RestaurantsDinner,Drinks,Fine Dining,Seafood,Steak House,Wine Bar
Shanghai Dumpling Shop722511Restaurants and Other Eating PlacesFull-Service RestaurantsChinese Food
McDonald's722513Restaurants and Other Eating PlacesLimited-Service RestaurantsBreakfast,Burgers,Counter Service,Dinner,Drive Through,Fast Food,Lunch
Baygreens722513Restaurants and Other Eating PlacesLimited-Service RestaurantsAmerican Food,Brunch,Salad

  • We've added net 101 new brands :confetti-ball:
    New Brands Include...

    • Marathon (marathonbrand.com), SG_BRAND_faaaac9cb18c500a97c03eec92d6b8fc) with 5688 US places.
    • ZIPS Car Wash (zipscarwash.com), SG_BRAND_79b040f298b5ac9) with 162 US places.
    • American 1 Credit Union (american1cu.org), SG_BRAND_6980414328db21c5) with 113 US places.
    • Tiger Rock Martial Arts (tigerrockmartialarts.com), SG_BRAND_3819b4b88d9159eb) with 96 US places.
    • Cookie Cutters Haircuts for Kids (haircutsarefun.com), SG_BRAND_10e24896f0b4091) with 89 US & 5 CA places.
    • Ombudsman (ombudsman.com), SG_BRAND_f36b7f9b8c409989) with 70 US places.
    • One Medical (onemedical.com), SG_BRAND_00f0efce83a7ff22) with 65 US places.
    • Quality Plus (qualityplusnc.com), SG_BRAND_7b084b361448eb34) with 58 US places.
    • Ascend Resort Collection (choicehotels.com/ascend), SG_BRAND_3087c2c140a9cb9b54e2ce2e739c00a7) with 56 US & 8 CA places.
    • Children's Lighthouse (childrenslighthouse.com), SG_BRAND_134c5fe6e47f265e) with 54 US places.
    • GUESS (guess.ca), SG_BRAND_44fc6c9812b78f5e76f9b25892fe6ad9) with 57 CA places. (NB: GUESS was already a SafeGraph Brand, but previously did not include coverage of Canadian locations).
    • And 90 more!! :chart-with-upwards-trend:

  • Improved coverage for high-value categories like Airports, Airport Terminals, Casinos, and Mini Golf We are making a concerted effort to improve coverage for many non-branded POI. Here are some of those improved categories (NAICS) in this release:

    • Airports Terminals/Concourses (488119) Net POI count change: 103. :airplane:
    • Casinos (713210) Net POI count change: 1100. :slot-machine:
    • Miniature Golf (713910) Net POI count change: 196 (154 in US, 51 in CA). :golf:

Bug Fixes and Known Issues - Core Places and Brands

  • We found some errors involving over-labeling of POI for some brands. In other words, we were creating branded POI incorrectly at some locations. These fixes resulted in significant decreases in the total number of POI for those affected brands. The new count is correct, and for transparency we'd like to list some of these fixes as examples in no particular order.

  • Sears Hardware Stores, (SG_BRAND_a89b31a8e736119a). Net POI count change: -6 US. Bug: We discovered that Sears Hardware Stores is not a separate brand from Sears Hometown Stores (SG_BRAND_305b0a21405390e3), so these have been merged into the latter.

  • Petco, (SG_BRAND_c5bc0c313e3f7af2ff0291d8846671ab). Net POI count change: -68 US. Bug: Incorrectly including subsidiary Unleashed by Petco locations (these were duplicates because locations are already accounted for with their own brand SG_BRAND_0c506e30249aff4bd40c279d2c1daac9).

  • We found some errors where we were missing some branded POI, and these fixes resulted in significant increases in the total number of POI for those affected brands. The new count is correct, and for transparency we'd like to list some of these fixes as examples in no particular order.

  • Weight Watchers (WW), (SG_BRAND_b0980641a37b38460ec96d65bd20fd9d). Net POI count change: +2,608 US +318 CA. Bug: Was incorrectly filtering out locations that had "studio" in the name, but these are true Weight Watchers POI.

  • Hucks, (SG_BRAND_26d489e6f425ebba). Net POI count change: 18. Bug: Improved our data sourcing for more complete coverage.

  • Bad SGPID Churn -- Bad sgpid churn are undesired failures to maintain a consistent safegraph_place_id (sgpid) between releases (see discussion in March 2019 release). We internally track and estimate our performance in this domain and share these numbers in our release notes for maximum transparency. In this release:

    • We dropped 56,704 sgpids (8,754 branded and 47,950 non-branded).
    • We added 71,537 sgpids (18,201 branded and 53,336 non-branded).
    • Note: We intentionally dropped many POI as part of a general cleanup from some of our most noisy and duplicative sources. Most of these drops are duplicates being removed. Some percent of these are true openings and closings (or new brands); the remainder are bad sgpid churn. We are continuing to work on better metrics to distinguish these cases.

  • Category Fill Rate We monitor category fill rate with 3 metrics: (1) category fill rate across the entire dataset, (2) category fill rate for branded POI, (3) category fill rate in the brand_info file (brand-level categories). We want all of these numbers to be 100%.

    • (1) All POI category fill rate. Last month 96.25%. This month 96.27%.
    • (2) Branded POI category fill rate. Last month 100%. This month 100% :100:
    • (3) Brand-level category fill rate (brand_info file). Last month 100%. This month 100%. :100:

Geometry

Enhancements - Geometry

Bug Fixes and Known Issues - Geometry

  • Centroid-Radius Polygons -- As discussed in March 2019 release notes. We internally track centroid-radius polygons vs precise polygons and strive for 100% precise polygons. You can measure this yourself using the is_synthetic column. Last release was 93.8%, this release is 93.7%. Here is how we are tracking on that metric over recent releases: Centroid-Radius Polygon Tracking.
  • Percent polygon_class = OWNED (as described in Oct 2019 release notes. We examine polygon_class for all safegraph_place_id that are both (i) branded and (ii) do NOT have a parent_safegraph_place_id; we call this group "branded, no-parent". We want 100% of "branded, no-parent" POI to have polygon_class = OWNED_POLYGON. Last month, the percent OWNED polygons for branded, no-parent was 75.6%. This month it is 76.1%. :+1: We continue to work on this. Here is how we are tracking on this metric in recent releases: OWNED vs SHARED Polygons in SafeGraph Places Release History.

Patterns

Enhancements - Patterns

  • In last month's delivery SG Patterns had 3,569,113 points-of-interest (US only). This month SG Patterns has 3,714,581 points-of-interest (US only) (net + 145,468 places) . :chart-with-upwards-trend: :heart-eyes-cat:
  • Last month SG Patterns had 956,256,848 visits from 33,829,366 visitors. This month SG Patterns has 1,073,278,638 visits from 40,577,097 visitors (delta +117,021,790 visits, +6,747,731 visitors). :christmas-tree: :family: :chart-with-upwards-trend: 

Also check out these new ways to get SafeGraph data: 
  * Need some extra data on other SafeGraph products? Check out the [SafeGraph Data Bar.](https://shop.safegraph.com/) 
  * Heavy AWS User?  Check out our [listings in the AWS Data Exchange](https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/search/results?filters=vendor_id&vendor_id=7d5ff8ca-105f-4856-9d99-5f2f1d83223c).
  * Are you an Esri or ArcGIS user? Check out our FREE data [SafeGraph Places in the Esri Marketplace](https://marketplace.arcgis.com/listing.html?id=3425348e4bee4059af2b353e52df43c2).
  * Or just drop us a line! Your data needs are our data delights!

p.s. **[SafeGraph Core Places & Geometry is now available in both US & Canada](https://docs.safegraph.com/changelog/october-2020-release-notes#section-canada-places-version-1-0-available-for-core-places-and-geometry-in-october-release)**