Foursquare's 104M Points of Interest

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Style Pass

2024-11-21 17:30:02

Point of Interest (POI) datasets of any strong quality have rarely been published freely. Overture and OpenStreetMap (OSM) have been making inroads but even in 2021, I could only find half of Starbucks' locations in OSM.

I've worked with a few of these commercial feeds. On their own, they're not great for plotting POIs on maps but they're invaluable for building geocoding systems.

This week, Foursquare announced they're making their POI dataset freely available. I was really surprised to hear this as I suspect they were earning a good amount of revenue from this dataset and there isn't a lot of competition from the freely available datasets.

I'd like to thank Sina Kashuk for publishing Foursquare's POI dataset to the Source Cooperative site. I'd also like to thank his co-founder Isaac Brodsky for granting me access to their geospatial computing platform Fused. It helped build fluency in this dataset while I was preparing this post.

I'm using a 6 GHz Intel Core i9-14900K CPU. It has 8 performance cores and 16 efficiency cores with a total of 32 threads and 32 MB of L2 cache. It has a liquid cooler attached and is housed in a spacious, full-sized, Cooler Master HAF 700 computer case. I've come across videos on YouTube where people have managed to overclock the i9-14900KF to 9.1 GHz.