Point of Interest (POI)
A specific location that matters in an analysis. In accessibility work, usually a place of everyday need: a supermarket, a school, a doctor, a pharmacy.
A point of interest, almost always shortened to POI, is a location that matters for a particular analysis. The term is deliberately broad, because what counts depends entirely on the question. In accessibility work, POIs are usually places of everyday need: supermarkets, kindergartens, schools, doctors, pharmacies, parks.
POIs are the destination half of any accessibility analysis. Where people live is one input, where they need to get to is the other, and the POI dataset is the second one. That makes the quality of the POI data decisive: a catchment analysis of pharmacies is only as good as the list of pharmacies behind it, and an open dataset that is missing a fifth of them will produce a map that looks precise and is wrong.
Two things to check in any POI dataset. Whether it is complete for the category, which for OpenStreetMap-derived data varies a lot by country and by category. And whether the category means what you think: “school” can include or exclude nurseries, vocational colleges and adult education, and the choice changes the result.