We've been pretty busy behind the scenes in December, upgrading some core pieces of our infrastructure to ensure ever higher accuracy in SafeGraph Places in 2019 👷

Looking forward to reporting more on these changes early next year! Until then, happy holidays! ⛄ 🎄 🌟 💫

Core Places

Enhancements

• Simpler open hours format 👇

Open Hours: what was the previous format and why did we need to change?

In the November 2018 and prior releases of SafeGraph Places, open_hours was:

A list of numbers; each pair describes the opening and associated closing time, in minutes, starting from midnight on Sunday (e.g. 360 = 6am on Sunday)

For example:
[600, 1080, 1950, 2640, 3390, 4080, 4830, 5520, 6270, 6960, 7710, 8400, 9150, 9840]

We heard from customers that this format was not easy to understand visually, or to work with programmatically.

The new, easier to use open hours format! 🎉

The new format for open hours is a JSON string with days as keys and opening & closing times (in the POI's local time) as values

• Each JSON string is guaranteed to have all 7 days as keys
• We indicate that a POI is closed for the day by giving it a value of "[]"
• We indicate that a POI is open the entire day by using a format like:

"Thu": [["0:00", "24:00"]]

• For POI that open and close multiple times throughout the day (e.g. a restaurant open in the morning and evening but not midday), we list multiple opening/closing pairs. For example:

“Sat": [["8:00", "13:00"], ["15:00", "22:30"]]

• This indicates that a POI is open from 8 am to 1 p.m. and also from 3 p.m. to 10:30 p.m. on Saturday.

• For POI that open and close on different days (e.g. a bar which opens at Tuesday at 6 p.m. and closes at Wednesday at 2 a.m.), we use a format like:

"Tue": [["18:00", "24:00"]], "Wed": [["0:00", "2:00"]]

To re-iterate: a “closing time” of 24:00 doesn’t mean the POI actually closes at midnight, if it’s followed by an opening time of 0:00 on the following day.

Example Open Hours JSON string

{ "Mon": [["8:00", "22:00"]], "Tue": [["8:00", "13:00"], ["18:00", "24:00"]], "Wed": [["0:00", "2:00"]], "Thu": [["0:00", "24:00"]], "Fri": [["23:00", "24:00"]], "Sat": [["0:00", "3:00"], ["15:00", "22:30"]], "Sun": [] }

This example represents the following open / close times:

• Open from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. on Monday
• Open from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. and 6 p.m. onwards on Tuesday
• Open until 2 a.m. on Wednesday (note: open from Tuesday 6pm through 2am Wednesday)
• Open all day on Thursday (i.e. midnight Wednesday to midnight Thursday)
• Open from 11 p.m. onwards on Friday
• Open until 3 a.m. and between 3 p.m. and 10:30 p.m. on Saturday
• Closed on Sunday

Patterns

Enhancements

• New device_type column. This provides visibility into the number of visitors to each POI that are using Android vs. iOS.

We love hearing feedback! Please get in touch with your Customer Success Manager if you have any suggestions or questions.