Physical places have a large amount of latent data. Pick any location on a map, and think about all of the questions you could ask about that location. What businesses are at that location? How many cars pass through it? What is the soil composition? How much is the land on that location worth?

The world of web-based information has become easy to query. We can use search engines like Google, as well as APIs like Diffbot and Clearbit. Today, the physical world is not so easy to query, but it is becoming easier. Location data as a service is a burgeoning field, with some vendors offering products for satellite data, foot traffic, and other specific location-based domains.

SafeGraph is a company that provides location data-as-a-service. SafeGraph data sets include data about businesses, patterns describing human movement, and geometric representations describing the shape and size of buildings. Ryan Fox Squire develops data products for SafeGraph, and he joins the show to talk about the engineering and strategy that goes into building a data-as-a-service company.