Fidelity

Quality (philosophy)

Geolocation

World Wide Web

Engineering

Philosophy

Urban planning

Visualization

Cartography

Geovisualization

Telecommunications

Data mining

Civil engineering

Computer science

Spatial analysis

Politics

Geography

Political science

Information visualization

Epistemology

Data science

Artificial intelligence

Remote sensing

Representation (politics)

Point of interest

Geospatial analysis

Computational Urban Science

In this commentary, we describe the current state of the art of points of interest (POIs) as digital, spatial datasets, both in terms of their quality and affordings, and how they are used across research domains. We argue that good spatial coverage and high-quality POI features - especially POI category and temporality information - are key for creating reliable data. We list challenges in POI geolocation and spatial representation, data fidelity, and POI attributes, and address how these challenges may affect the results of geospatial analyses of the built environment for applications in public health, urban planning, sustainable development, mobility, community studies, and sociology. This commentary is intended to shed more light on the importance of POIs both as standalone spatial datasets and as input to geospatial analyses.

Points of Interest (POI): a commentary on the state of the art, challenges, and prospects for the future