Foursquare today switched on its new Foursquare Graph today with the goal of making location data insights more accessible and valuable.
The company describes its new geospatial knowledge graph this way. “A novel way of organizing geospatial datasets using graph technologies and the H3 grid system to transform how businesses derive value from location data.”
H3 is a geospatial indexing system originally developed by Uber.
“Data is an essential resource for every company today. But rarely is it maximized to its full potential,” Foursquare President and CEO Gary Little said in a statement.
“The Foursquare Graph will harmonize the company’s full product suite. [This will allow] unprecedented querying, visualization capabilities, and advanced analytics to solve complex technical challenges that enable customers to unlock key business insights with ease and speed. This innovation will empower businesses to realize more value in geospatial data insights than previously possible.”
OK, So What Is it?
The Foursquare Graph is essentially a tool that allows companies to derive faster and more up-to-date location insights. Or, according to Foursquare, “to answer questions about places and the ways in which cohorts of people move about them.”
Foursquare offers a few illustrations of questions that the graph might help answer.
“It could be the visit patterns pre and post-an event such as a concert. Or in a macro sense, it could be the change in the foot traffic and average dwell time in different types of stores pre- and post-natural disaster.”
Foursquare sees the graph as a way around the barriers preventing companies from accessing geospatial data. Such data can provide powerful insights. But can also be incredibly difficult to access. In fact, Forrester data shows that only 26% of data strategy leaders believe their organizations are fully leveraging location data.
“Analyzing location data has historically required companies to maintain highly specialized resources and skill sets in-house. Or because the process of cleaning and joining location data takes up valuable time,” said Vikram Gundeti, Foursquare Vice President and Distinguished Engineer in a blog post announcing and explaining the graph.
“We identified and seized the opportunity to build a first-of-its-kind geospatial knowledge graph that will reinvent how our customers derive insights from location intelligence.”
Privacy First
Foursquare is placing great emphasis on the privacy-friendly features of the new graph. The core privacy principle Foursquare is following is to aggregate data around locations vs individuals. Here is how the company explains its approach to privacy with the graph.
“If a team is looking at where shoppers go either before or after they visit a store within a mall, the insights will be aggregated around the stores rather than the shoppers. With this transformative technology, businesses can now derive the same strong insights, without the need to share individualized data.”
