This dataset contains filtered retail Point of Interest (POI) data for the
United Kingdom, derived from Foursquare Open Source Places.
Foursquare publishes Open Source Places as global tables in an Iceberg
catalogue. This GeoDS data product gives users the UK retail subset as a single
file, reducing the technical complexity of access. It also removes the filtering
work required to isolate UK retail activity.
Only venues marked as currently open are considered. The POIs are then filtered
both for quality (e.g. defunct retailers, near-duplicates, coordinates that do
not match the postcode) and to retail-related POIs only, keeping consumer-facing
retail and service activity while excluding commercial activity that is not
retail. The POI filtering method is documented in the accompanying paper, linked below.
Content
These data are provided as GeoParquet and as a GeoPackage, at POI level. Each
row is a unique POI, carrying the single category it was finally selected on by
the retail filter. Foursquare assigns more than one category to 19.6% of these
POIs; for those, the full list of classifications is retained in
fsq_category_labels.
The data carry the Foursquare place attributes including name, address, contact
details, coordinates, and the full level 1–6 category taxonomy.
It also appends the Local Authority District containing each POI, the GeoDS UK
Retail Centre containing it where there is one, and an H3 spatial index at
resolution 11.
For a detailed description of the columns see the Variable Dictionary, and for
an overview of the data see the Data Summary. Both can be downloaded from the
bottom of this page.
Quality, Representation and Bias
Foursquare Open Source Places aggregates
contributions of varying provenance, and attribute completeness is uneven across
sources and categories. Category assignment is inherited from Foursquare and not
independently verified, so the retail definition is only as consistent as the
upstream taxonomy.
These data are periodically rebuilt against later Foursquare releases. The file
will therefore diverge from the POI extract used to define the GeoDS UK Retail
Centres, which was taken at a fixed point in time. The retail centre boundaries
are not redrawn when this dataset is updated.
These data are derived from Foursquare Open Source Places and are made available under the Apache License, Version 2.0.
The data have been modified: the UK subset was extracted, filtered for quality and for retail activity, and joined to Local Authority District, retail centre and H3 identifiers. Attribution to Foursquare is preserved in the NOTICE.txt distributed with the data below.
