FSQ Places Engine: combining advanced AI technology with human verification for high quality POI data

The comprehensive, industry-leading approach to building accurate and reliable Places data

For years, Foursquare has been at the forefront of providing accurate and reliable location data. And today, our Places product is the leading independent location-based platform, a position we sustain by creating, maintaining and refreshing a massive global dataset of over 200M POI.

Places, the backbone of our offerings at Foursquare, caters to diverse consumer applications, ranging from APIs and consumer apps, and Targeting to Attribution products. All our technologies are anchored in precise ‘point of interest data’ (POI) – enter the Places Engine.?

Places Engine

The Places engine fundamentally changes how we create, update, and validate?POI data.?It allows us to combine a breadth of programmatic data sources with the depth of human verified sources to deliver a curated and accurate dataset for all of our products and services at Foursquare. Now, we are excited to share some updates with you all.?

With the new Places engine, we are taking advantage of coverage sources like web crawls, listing syndicators, and data partners, and combining them with the human power of Foursquare’s Superuser community and their high levels of app engagement?to surface the most accurate and nuanced dataset available.

At Foursquare, we have always relied on a combination of programmatic data sources and user-generated content to populate our Places database. While this methodology has served us well, we have the opportunity to improve the accuracy and depth of our dataset even further by adding a human layer distinct from 3rd party.

Places Engine is reinventing operational sustainability by connecting all the systems that make our data flow. In this pattern, data will move from app user to knowledge graph and back again, starting the virtuous cycle all over.

Innovating for the future: utilizing the human element

A human element has always played an important role in our data process at Foursquare. Now, Places Engine will add human moderation to the very core of our data process and validation.

Prior to Places Engine, humans created user-generated content and provided inputs for POI in?our Places database, which weren’t viewed much differently than our 3rd party and crawl data. With this methodology, we looked for consensus across all sources, which meant sources were generally treated the same, without prioritization.

Looking at a fictitious example… ‘The Donut Pub’

Let’s imagine that two different humans verified that ‘The Donut Pub’ is located at 740 Broadway, but three programmatic sources (crawl and third-party data vendors) said it was called ‘Donut Pub’ and located at 10 Astor Pl.?

In this case, Places would prioritize the three programmatic sources, rather than the two human inputs. Historically, Places would deliver the location that has greater consensus (10 Astor Place) to clients, which could mean the next time a user tries to navigate to a ‘Donut Pub’ in New York City, they may arrive at the wrong location if it is in fact located at 740 Broadway.?

The lesson here is that a consensus-based approach fails to fully capture the human experience, which is the ultimate ground-truth source for nuances of the world.

Places Engine will solve for this conundrum by adding a distinct human layer separate from 3rd party data sources, providing Foursquare with a view of the world that is uniquely valuable, while generating higher-quality data that can’t be found anywhere on the interwebs. Places Engine enables Foursquare to leverage the humans generated data more effectively, all while maintaining access to the breadth of knowledge generated by programmatic data.

What makes the Places Engine unique?

There are three main components to the Places Engine. The Reporter, the Voter, and the re-centering of infrastructure around the idea of voting. When working together, these three components align all Foursquare products under a single dataset.

In ‘The Donut Pup’ example, a CityGuide user may see ‘Donut Pub’ at 10 Astor Pl. and decide to try it out. Upon arrival, they will struggle to find it, realizing it isn’t a store at all. In reality, ‘The Donut Pub’ is located 5-minutes away on foot at 740 Broadway. The user can submit edits to the name and address in the CityGuide app.?

Should their proposed edit receive sufficient corroboration, Places will begin geotagging ‘The Donut Pub’ at 740 Broadway, guaranteeing the next time a user tries to navigate there, they’d arrive at the right spot to get that donut.?

Customer impact

Human moderation will set off a series of cascading benefits across Foursquare and all of its clients. With Places Engine...

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