Point-of-interest (POI) data from map sources are increasingly used in a wide range of applications, including real estate, land use, and transport planning. However, uncertainties in data quality arise from the fact that some of this data are crowdsourced and proprietary validation workflows lack transparency. Comparing data quality between POI sources without standardized validation metrics is a challenge. This study reviews and implements the available POI validation methods, working towards identifying a set of metrics that is applicable across datasets. Twenty-three validation methods were found and categorized. Most methods evaluated positional accuracy, while logical consistency and usability were the least represented. A subset of nine methods was implemented to assess four real-world POI datasets extracted for a highly urbanized neighborhood in Singapore. The datasets were found to have poor completeness with errors of commission and omission, although spatial errors were reasonably low (<60 m). Thematic accuracy in names and place types varied. The move towards standardized validation metrics depends on factors such as data availability for intrinsic or extrinsic methods, varying levels of detail across POI datasets, the influence of matching procedures, and the intended application of POI data.

As the world rapidly urbanizes in pace with economic growth, the rising demand for products and services in cities is putting a strain on the existing road infrastructure, leading to traffic congestion and other negative externalities. To mitigate the impacts of freight movement within commercial areas, city planners have begun focusing their attention on the parking behaviors of commercial vehicles. Unfortunately, there is a general lack of information on such activities because of the heterogeneity of practices and the complex nature of urban goods movement. Furthermore, field surveys and observations of truck parking behavior are often faced with significant challenges, resulting in the collection of sparse and incomplete data. The objective of this study is to develop a regression model to predict the parking duration of commercial vehicles at the loading bays of retail malls and identify significant factors that contribute to this dwell time. The dataset used in this study originates from a truck parking and observation survey conducted at the loading bays of nine retail malls in Singapore, containing information about the trucks’ and drivers’ activities. However, because of the presence of incomplete fields found in the dataset, the authors propose the use of a generative adversarial multiple imputation networks algorithm to impute the incomplete fields before developing the regression model using the imputed dataset. Through the parking duration model, the activity type, parking location, and volume of goods delivered (or picked up) were identified as significant features influencing vehicle dwell time, corroborating with findings in the literature.

Point of interest (POI) data serves as a valuable source of semantic information for places of interest and has many geospatial applications in real estate, transportation, and urban planning. With the availability of different data sources, POI conflation serves as a valuable technique for enriching data quality and coverage by merging the POI data from multiple sources. This study proposes a novel end-to-end POI conflation framework consisting of six steps, starting with data procurement, schema standardisation, taxonomy mapping, POI matching, POI unification, and data verification. The feasibility of the proposed framework was demonstrated in a case study conducted in the eastern region of Singapore, where the POI data from five data sources was conflated to form a unified POI dataset. Based on the evaluation conducted, the resulting unified dataset was found to be more comprehensive and complete than any of the five POI data sources alone. Furthermore, the proposed approach for identifying POI matches between different data sources outperformed all baseline approaches with a matching accuracy of 97.6% with an average run time below 3 min when matching over 12,000 POIs to result in 8699 unique POIs, thereby demonstrating the framework’s scalability for large scale implementation in dense urban contexts.