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Joining Foursquare and Overture Places Using Placekey

by Placekey

Joined datasets are more valuable. They offer a complete view of data, enabling deeper insights, more informed decision-making, and a holistic understanding of relationships and patterns that standalone datasets might overlook. Additionally, they allow for analysis to enhance data quality by cross-referencing attributes across sources, ensuring consistency, identifying discrepancies, and improving overall accuracy.

However, joining datasets is often daunting due to inconsistencies and variations in addresses and places names. You can try this yourself with fuzzy matching and run into the many problems or simply try Placekey.

Placekey helps with entity resolution allowing merging and deduping of datasets to take just seconds. We were able to use Placekey to join Overture Maps Places and the recently released Foursquare Places Dataset in a few seconds with just a few clicks in the Placekey developer dashboard.

Insights from the Join

For the purpose of this join we focused on US Places. We first applied Placekeys to 103,413,964 rows in the Foursquare Open Source Places dataset and 42,084,985 rows in the Overture Maps Places dataset. No dataset is perfect meaning you will likely run into odd names and closed locations in the Foursquare dataset and null values for some attributes across both datasets.

This join revealed overlaps and enriched both datasets with additional information. Here are some key insights:

7,868,660 Placekeys matched between the datasets.

  • Foursquare added 7,868,660 values for 'geometry' and 'confidence' from Overture.
  • Overture added 7,868,660 values for 'name' and 6,998,972 for 'fsq_category_ids’ from Foursquare

This just scratches the surface of what each dataset was able to contribute to the other. Millions of records across both datasets were enriched with lat/lon, phone numbers, socials, websites, and more.

How to Perform the Join Yourself

You can sign up for Placekey, execute this join, and download the datasets for free. We recommend navigating to the Join Datasets section of the developer dashboard 

Other options are available like dropping off a file in the Bulk Upload section or using the API to append Placekeys to your own datasets. Whatever method you choose it takes just a few minutes to get started.

About the Datasets

In November 2024, Foursquare released its Open Source Places dataset, offering access to over 100 million global Points of Interest (POIs). This dataset encompasses a wide array of locations, including restaurants, retail stores, and public spaces, each annotated with 22 core attributes such as name, address, and geolocation coordinates. The data is available under the Apache 2.0 license, facilitating its integration into various applications and services.

The Overture Maps Foundation, established through a collaboration among industry leaders like Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, and TomTom, aims to create reliable, easy-to-use, and interoperable open map data. Global open map datasets, including comprehensive information on places, addresses, buildings, and transportation networks are all available for immediate use. These datasets are designed to support a wide range of applications, from mapping services to geospatial analysis, and are accessible under open data licenses.

What is Placekey?

Placekey is a universal standard identifier for physical places, designed to make it easy to join and merge location-based data across different datasets. By assigning a unique key to each address or point of interest, Placekey eliminates the complexities of joining datasets and reduces data discrepancies 

With Placekey, organizations can match, deduplicate, and sync location data with speed and accuracy, enabling deeper insights and better decision-making. It simplifies traditionally complex processes, allowing users to focus on unlocking the value of their data rather than dealing with its inconsistencies.

For more information, explore the documentation and our technical whitepaper.

Potential Use Cases

The merged dataset of Foursquare Open Source Places and Overture Maps Places, joined with Placekey, provides a powerful resource for unlocking insights and solving data challenges. By combining these datasets, users can enhance their understanding of locations, uncover patterns, and fill in missing information. This enriched data opens doors for:

  • Business Strategy: Companies can identify optimal locations for new stores, improve targeted marketing, and make data-driven decisions with confidence.
  • Urban Planning: Planners can use the combined data to analyze underserved areas and enhance infrastructure planning.
  • Data Innovation: The dataset is a foundation for geospatial analysis, machine learning models

With Placekey, merging datasets is quick and simple, transforming fragmented data into a unified, valuable resource for many industries and projects.

Conclusion

By joining Foursquare and Overture data with Placekey, we have demonstrated the ease and effectiveness of using this tool for data merging. This process not only enriches datasets but also fosters new insights and applications. We encourage you to explore Placekey for your data projects and discover the unique opportunities it offers. Whether you're handling a few records or millions, Placekey facilitates seamless joining and enhances the value of your data.

Get ready to unlock new insights on physical places