Core Places

SafeGraph’s Places data provides baseline information for every record in the product suite, including location name, address, lat/long, category, brand, and more. With POI data for countries around the world, you can gain insights about any location that a person can visit aside from private residences.

Check out our Summary Statistics for detailed information on our coverage.

Contents:

• Schema
• Key Concepts
• Column Details
• Data Issues or Artifacts

Places Schema

SafeGraph updates the Places dataset every month with the past month's openings and closings and maintains a persistent placekey across releases.

All SafeGraph datasets are formatted as delimited CSVs, combining the desired rows and columns. Please reference Column Ordering for specific column ordering combinations.

core_poi.csv [reference file name for enterprise deliveries]

Brand Info

[brand_info.csv]

A SafeGraph brand is defined as a logo or branded store which has multiple locations all under the same logo or store banner. For a deep dive on how we think about brands, see our November 2018 Release Notes.

The brand_info file is a separate csv that is complimentary with any Places purchase. See brands for more details.

Key Concepts

Places Scope

Places provides baseline information for every record in the SafeGraph product suite via the Places schema and polygon information when applicable via the [Geometry schema]. The current scope of a place is defined as any location humans can visit with the exception of single-family homes. This definition encompasses a diverse set of places ranging from restaurants, grocery stores, and malls; to parks, hospitals, museums, offices, and industrial parks. Premium sets of Places include apartment buildings (naics_code = 531110), Parking Lots, and Point POIs (Places schema only).

SafeGraph Places is a global offering with varying coverage depending on the country. Note that address conventions and formatting vary across countries. SafeGraph has coalesced these fields into the Places schema.

👀 Are we missing a brand or country? 👀 Please let us know here! We are adding hundreds of new brands across all countries every month, and we prioritize our brand queue based on your feedback. If you have more general product feedback or questions, please contact us here.

placekey

Placekey is a unique and persistent identifier for any physical place in the world that intelligently partitions the ID into meaningful encodings. So how does Placekey work?

‍When both parts of a placekey come together, the final result reads as What@Where. This is a unique way of shedding light on both the descriptive element of a place as well as its geospatial position in the physical world via a single identifier.

What: Address Encoding
The first three characters refer to the Address Encoding, creating a unique identifier for a given address. An address at “555 Main Street Suite 105” will have a different Address Encoding than “555 Main Street Suite 106.” However, "444 Second Street, Suite 4" will have the same address encoding as "444 2nd St. #4" to adjust for common address formats.

What: POI Encoding
The second set of three characters in the 'What Part' refers to the POI Encoding. If a specific place has a location name (like "Central Park") and is already included in the Placekey reference datasets, these characters will be present. The benefit of the POI Encoding is that it can point to a specific point of interest that may have existed at a certain address at a given point in time.

Where: H3 Encoding
The 'Where Part,' on the other hand, is made up of three unique character sequences, built upon Uber’s open source H3 grid system. This information in the 'Where Part' is based on the centroid of that place. In other words, we take the latitude and longitude of a specific place and then use a conversion function to determine a hexagon in the physical world, representing about 15,000 sq. meters, containing the centroid of that place. The 'Where Part' of the Placekey is, therefore, the full encoding of that hexagon.

Open access to your own datasets using the FREE Placekey API.

Point POIs

Some places are small and not well defined by a geometric shape. We refer to these places as "Point POIs" and intentionally do not offer a polygon nor Patterns data. Places like transit stops, ATMs, kiosks, and electric vehicle charging stations are examples of Point POIs found in our data, and we flag these by setting the geometry_type column = "POINT." Point POIs are a premium portion of the Places offering, and we are continually adding new types and brands.

Brands

SafeGraph curates over 7,700 distinct brands and growing. These are chains of commercial POIs that include all major brands in the United States, Canada, and Great Britain (McDonald's, AMC, Macy's, Chevrolet, Whole Foods Market, etc.).

Note that ~80% of POIs have no brand associated as they are single commercial locations (local restaurants, museums, etc.). SafeGraph is continually improving the fill rate of brands with each release - please contact us if you notice a brand missing.

Some POIs include multiple brands. For example, a car dealership may sell multiple car brands, or branded POIs may be co-located (Ex: Taco Bell and KFC in the same space; IMAX and AMC cinemas in the same building). In these cases, the brands and safegraph_brand_ids are listed as an array that is alphabetized by brand name (the order does not specify any importance).

Brands provide an easy way to isolate major stores. If you know you are searching for a brand that we cover, we advise searching by the brands column instead of the location_name column. For even better specificity, search the brand_info file by brands and build your workflows around safegraph_brand_id.

Every place has a location_name, but only POIs belonging to a chain will have a brand. In some cases, location_name and brand will be the same, but in other cases they are intentionally different. For example, the most common name for an individual Starbucks store is its brand name, so it is also reflected in the location_name column. However, the most common name for the Bellagio Hotel & Casino is not its brand name "MGM Resorts." In this case, the location_name shows "Bellagio Hotel & Casino" and brands shows "MGM Resorts."

If you are having difficulty matching location names or brand names to your own POI listings, we offer a matching service that will provide you with the placekeys of of our locations mapped to your existing POI data.

Categorization of POI

SafeGraph Places uses the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) developed by the US Census Bureau, which consists of a numeric NAICS code up to 6 digits in length. Although this taxonomy was developed in the US, we have found it just as useful for categorizing POIs in other countries as well and will continue to use it until a better alternative presents itself. We currently reference the 2017 version of NAICS. We will provide an update if and when we ultimately update to reflect the 2022 changes.

The NAICS code itself is hierarchical; in other words, the first 2 digits describe a very general category, and additional digits describe more and more specific categories. For example:

• 72 is the general category Accommodation and Food Services.
• 722 is the more specific category Food Services and Drinking Places.
• 7225 is the even more specific category Restaurants and Other Eating Places.
• 722513 is the most specific category Limited-Service Restaurants (i.e. quick-serve or fast-food restaurants).

We strive to assign a best fitting naics_code for all of our POIs. Our goal is to assign a full six digits for maximum granularity wherever possible, but our category algorithm cannot always infer a high confidence six digit naics_code based on POI name and other descriptive metadata. In these cases, we provide a shorter naics_code where we do have high confidence in the assignment (i.e. 3, 4 , 5 digits). In these circumstances, we choose to sacrifice the extra digits of precision in exchange for high veracity predictions and also because the extra precision is not always meaningfully different (i.e. some adjacent 6 digit NAICS are extremely similar).

See our Places Summary Statistics for the latest details on counts and coverage.

Also see our use of Category Tags to provide more flexibility and granularity where the NAICS code classification falls short.

Determining when POI Open and Close

opened_on and closed_on dates are determined from metadata at the source level. If a new POI from an existing source repeatedly appears in our build pipeline, it is flagged as opened_on during the month in which it first appears. Similarly, if a POI from an existing source repeatedly disappears in our build pipeline, it is flagged as closed_on during the month in which it first disappears. These flags are added to the Places product permitting final QA checks and overall data hygiene.

Temporary closures are not captured in open/close tracking, and it became difficult to distinguish permanent closures from temporary closures at the onset of COVID-19. This resulted in a relatively low count of POIs with closed_on values between "2020-03" and "2020-06" as we erred towards the side of caution to not mistakenly mark temporarily closed businesses as permanently closed.

If a POI has not yet been sourced consistently enough to provide the metadata needed to determine closed_on dates, then it will have a null value in the tracking_closed_since column. In general, the SafeGraph Places product tracks opened_on and closed_on dates from as early as 2019-07 onward, and therefore, the majority of POIs that have a tracking_closed_since date will show a value of "2019-07."

Please note that closed_on values are over-indexed on "2020-01" as January 2020 was the first Places release featuring the open/close columns . At this time, only branded POIs (POIs with a safegraph_brand_id) contained enough metadata to determine a true store closure during that month. Non-branded POIs with a "2020-01" closed_on value implies that the POI closed sometime before January 2020, but we do not have enough metadata history to determine the exact yyyy-mm.

A second spike in closed_on values occurred in October of 2021 thanks to new information about more than 130k "longtail" POIs. Like the January 2020 anomaly, the "2021-10" closed_on value implies that the POI closed sometime before October 2021, but we cannot determine the exact yyyy-mm.

For countries outside of the US, CA and GB, we anticipate non-null values for tracking_closed_since, closed_on, and opened_on beginning in the November 2021 release which will be the first time where we have a long enough track record to support these columns.

All other closed_on values are precise within a < 60 day margin of error.

The opened_on, closed_on and tracking_closed_since columns are specific to Places. These are not available in stand-alone Geometry or Patterns purchases. If Places is purchased in combination with Geometry and/or Patterns, the Geometry and Patterns specific fields will be null for any POIs with a closed_on date. Please reference Column Ordering for details on where these columns exist per product combination.

Column Name Detailed Descriptions

placekey

Placekey is a unique and persistent identifier for any physical place in the US that intelligently partitions the ID into meaningful encodings. See the Placekey key concept for a detailed description.

parent_placekey

This Placekey column will identify a larger place that may encompass a given POI, which we refer to as the "Parent". Think of an indoor shopping mall as the parent of the individual stores inside. For any place without an assigned polygon, the parent_placekey column will be null because we rely on geometric relationships to identify parent/child hierarchy. So for example, any of our Point POI will not have an assigned parent because they do not have defined polygons. You can find out more about our process for defining these relationships in our Spatial Hierarchy section where we also include a list of all the types of places that can serve as "Parents".

top_category, sub_category, naics_code

top_category and sub_category are the string labels associated with the first 4 digits and 6 digits of naics_code, respectively. See Categorization of POI section above.

latitude , longitude

• In general, latitude and longitude are defined by our best knowledge of the POI location. It is not designed to specifically locate the front door of the business, but rather defines the general center of the business.
• Latitude and longitude still attempt to identify the individual business even if that business and others have the same polygon (e.g. strip mall).

street_address

• We implement a number of steps to clean, validate and standardize street_address.
• You should expect street_address to be title-cased, consistent, and friendly for human reading. Please send us your feedback if you see otherwise.
• If you care about street addresses as much as we do, we also have more specific address columns to split out address components. These are optional and available upon request for future deliveries.
  • primary_number
  • street_predirection
  • street_name
  • street_postdirection
  • street_suffix

city

• In the US, all centroids (latitudes/longitudes) are referenced against a geospatial file of city boundaries as defined by the US Census Bureau (browse the boundaries here). In edge cases, the preferred city name in the address line reflects a pre-annexed city name, and we try our best to preserve those city names where possible.

• In Canada, city names are the output of normalized address strings from POI sources.

• In Great Britain, city names are the output of normalized address strings from POI sources, but in edge cases, we allow POIs to have a null city name as long as region is populated. The region column in Great Britain refers to county boundaries, and counties are a decent alternative to cities for geographic filtering.

• city may be null for POIs outside of the US and Canada as well as for National Park POIs in the U.S.

region

• When iso_country_code == US, then this is the US state or territory.
• When iso_country_code == CA, then this is the Canadian Province or territory.
• When iso_country_code == GB, then this is the United Kingdom county.
• For all other iso_country_codes this is the state/province or equivalent.

postal_code

• When iso_country_code == US, then this is the US 5 digit zip code.
• When iso_country_code == CA, then this is the Canadian postal code in the form of a 3 digit Forward Sortation Area (FSA), a space, and the 3 digit Local Delivery Unit (LDU).
• When iso_country_code == GB, then this is the British postal code. Learn more about Great Britain postal code precision here.
• postal_code may be null for National Park POIs in the U.S.

phone_number

This is a 10 digit phone number in the US and Canada or a 12 digit phone number in Great Britain. We filter out toll-free numbers (e.g. 1-800) and strive to have POI-specific numbers (not franchise-level or corporate-level numbers).

open_hours

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 pm and also from 3 pm to 10:30 pm on Saturday.
• For POI that open and close on different days (e.g. a bar which opens on Tuesday at 6 pm and closes on Wednesday at 2 am), we use a format like:
  • "Tue": [["18:00", "24:00"]], "Wed": [["0:00", "2:00"]]

category_tags

• category_tags provide higher-granularity category information beyond what can be found in a NAICS code label. So instead of just "Full-Service Restaurant" (NAICS 722511), we'll also provide tags like 'Pizza', 'Lunch', 'Dinner', 'Drive Through', and 'Late Night' so that you can glean more meaningful details about that specific restaurant. Trying to find a place that serves coffee? Our 'coffee shop' tag spans more than 30 NAICS categorizations, giving you a much easier method to pinpoint specific places based on granular inputs.
• Category information is conveyed is a list of descriptive words about the POI. e.g ['Mexican Food, Dinner]
• Category tags are broadly available across NAICS codes though not every NAICS code will have them. Here is the full list of possible tags for each NAICS code. SafeGraph strives to label all relevant tags and will include up to 13 tags for any given POI.

geometry_type

This is the geometric shape associated with the POI where possible values are: "POLYGON" or "POINT." This is meant to distinguish traditional SafeGraph places which currently have Geometry or will eventually have Geometry ("POLYGON") from places that intentionally do not have Geometry ("POINT.") Some POIs have geometry_type = "POLYGON" but no corresponding WKT because we have not yet built our Geometry product in that region of the world. See our summary stats page for details on Geometry coverage.

Column Ordering

Reference this sheet for specific column orders when licensing various product combinations.

Known Data Issues or Artifacts

closed_on First Featured

Please note that closed_on values are over-indexed on "2020-01" as January 2020 was the first Places release featuring the open/close columns. At this time, only branded POIs (POIs with a safegraph_brand_id) contained enough metadata to determine a true store closure during that month. Non-branded POIs with a "2020-01" closed_on value implies that the POI closed sometime before January 2020, but we do not have enough metadata history to determine the exact yyyy-mm. All other closed_on values are precise within a < 60 day margin of error.

opened_on for "non-branded" POIs

Please note that opened_on dates are only inferred for POIs with a safegraph_brand_id. We are working towards sourcing more robust metadata for "non-branded" POIs to close this gap.