In today's era, there has been a great shift in how customers interact with businesses and locations around them. Taking a cab on the roadside is replaced by taking ride-share services like Lyft and Uber. People opt for food deliveries at their doorsteps instead of waiting in line at local restaurants. There is an application for everything, from buying clothes to running errands.
Let’s have a look at the definition of Point Of Interest.
What Is the Point Of Interest?
A point of interest is a record of a place on a map where someone finds something useful. A POI is typically defined by its geographical coordinates and a few additional attributes like category and name.
The good examples of POI are Empire State Building at latitude 40.748817, and longitude -73.985428.
Let’s have a look at how this POI data is generated.
Process Of Generating POI Data?
There are multiple resources from where the POI data can be collected and taken. Here are some of the resources from where the POI data is extracted.
● Data Extraction From Web Sources: The most useful way of acquiring data is the automatic extraction of POIs from the web sources like OpenStreetMap, Google Maps, etc. Some companies are using web scraping tools to export the POI information directly into a database or file. The sites like OpenStreetMap allows users to extract data directly through geospatial data points.
● User Generated Data: In the past decade there has been a surge in the use of social media to give user-generated content, including location data. Multiple businesses rely on user-generated location data or purchase data from vendors who are running applications that are collecting data. Verifying your location is very important while working on multiple applications nowadays.
● Government Directories: Most government bodies require businesses to provide commercial locations as part of their business registration process. These postal addresses can be combined to form a POI dataset.
● Manual Verification: Some POI data providers contract personnel to manually maintain their POI database. For example, walking the city with a smartphone running on a purpose-built app and adding new locations or verifying the existing ones. If you compare it with other methods, this process guarantees accuracy and promises a healthy stream.
Ways To Represent POI Data
There are multiple ways to represent POI data. Some of the basic ways are mentioned below:
● Coordinates
● Postal Codes
● Geohash
● H3
These are some of the ways of representing the POI data. Let’s have a look at how POI data is used.
How is POI Data Used?
Businesses can improve their capability to improve and grow exponentially with the information about a specific location or a collection of similar locations. With the help of a combination of additional contextual parameters like human volatility, dynamics of an area, sociology, and more.
Summary
To get a clear and better idea of what big geological data tells you about your POI you can visit AirSage official website.
