Discussions

Dear Dewey admins

We are having trouble with OPENED_ON and CLOSED_ON variables in Safegraph POI data we have downloaded in April 2025. Our hope was to describe how the number of at least some POIs evolved over time in the US, but we realized that none of the rows are populated for these variables.

Yet, the discussions in your Q&A section suggest that opening and closing dates of POIs should be available for some POIs and some recent years (despite limited coverage). For example, in one response to a user query, you have written that Safegraph has "only started tracking these dates in the past few years.

Another Dewey Q&A forum entry for Safegraph on this topic says "... there is no way to access previous versions of that data. That being said, it theoretically shouldn't be necessary given that they're tracking Open/Close date of Places that were changed during the timeframe while they were collecting this data, which generally started in July 2019. They don't have historical Open/Close dates before that time."

Moreover, the help file here suggests that POIs with a safegraph_brand_id should have full or decent coverage of opening and closing dates.

Is there some complementary dataset we should have downloaded? Can you please advise?

Thanks!