Points of Interest (POIs)

Points of interest (POIs) are used to represent a location of interest, such as a retail store or fast-food restaurant. Mira's POI dataset has over 16 million verified locations, which are sourced from multiple high-quality sources.

POIs are organized into hierachical categories (290 top-level, 3000 2nd-level categories). Additionally, each POI may belong to a POI Chain, which is essentially a brand or franchise. See Chains and Categories for more information.

Currently, access to POIs is read-only; users cannot create their own POIs. We felt that all use cases a user may have for creating a custom POI could be fulfilled by creating a custom location, though this may change in the future.

Address Reverification

When Mira processes POIs from data partners, we take the additional step of joining provider POIs to OpenStreetMap (OSM), which is an open-source geodata project. We do this to ensure POI addresses and locations from providers are commensurate with OSM and to resolve discrepancies.

Polygon Generation

Data providers usually provide POIs as addresses or latitude/longitude (points), not polygons. In order to be useful, we must create a polygon for each POI in our dataset. To do this we:

• Overlay POIs onto building footprints
  • Sourced from OSM (user-edited) and Microsoft US Building dataset (generated from satellite imagery)
• Perform quality checks to eliminate corner cases
  • E.g. large strip malls sometimes show up as one building → limit size and pull in OSM suite-level address data to algorithmically slice polygons.
• Fine-grained radius fallback
  • If a POI does not match a building, we fall back onto a very small radius around the POI (typically 25m)
  • Certain categories of business (e.g. department stores) fallback onto larger radii