Places and geography

Every Hiasynth tool takes a place, and naming one is the single most useful thing you can do for an answer. It makes the question specific, and it makes it fast: a city comes back in seconds, while a question with no place scans all 522 million people and can take over a minute. This page covers how places are named and what happens to them.

Ways to name a place

Names work in the local language and in English: Wien and Vienna, München and Munich, Bayern and Bavaria. Codes are the official ones: NUTS codes for regions, national municipality codes, ISO codes for countries.

A radius can be anything from 0.5 to 100 km, and defaults to 5. It is the natural way to ask about a site: the catchment of a store, the surroundings of a development, the walking distance of a station.

The index only contains places where people live in this build, around 237,000 of them. If a name resolves, it can be answered.

When a name is shared

Place names repeat. There are four districts called Södermalm in Sweden, and a Newport in most counties of Britain. Hiasynth picks the largest match, tells you which one it picked, and lists the others:

Södermalm, Stockholm (district), 77,647 people
also: Södermalm, Sundsvall · Södermalm, Kristinehamn · Södermalm, Lycksele

Every answer carries the label of the place it was computed for, so a wrong match is visible instead of silent. To get a different one, add the country or the city: "Södermalm in Sundsvall". When a name only matched approximately, the answer says so as well, and names any country that is not in the build yet, so a near miss never reads as a confident answer. The country input exists for exactly this, and resolve_place lets your assistant check a name before spending a larger call on it.

The ladder

Places nest, and the tools move up and down the same ladder.

The grain of a breakdown

When a tool lists places, core markets, hotspots, a ranking, it has to choose what counts as a place. Leave it alone and it picks the grain the question implies:

• All of Europe: regions.
• A country or a large region: municipalities, which is what "market" usually means in practice.
• A city or anything smaller: the finest units, and the 1 km² cells where the audience clusters.

You can override it by saying so: "break it down by NUTS3" matches a NUTS3 map layer, "by region" gives you a shorter list. For drawing a map, analyze_market can return a compact count for every region instead of only the top ones; your assistant should only ask for that when you are actually rendering one.

Small places

Nothing under 100 people is ever shown (Reading an answer). For places that has two consequences.

A very small place is widened. Ask about a hamlet of 700 people and almost any audience inside it falls under that floor. The answer is given for the municipality or region around it, and says that it was widened and why.

Sensitive attributes stay coarse. Religion, origin, health and political leaning are never broken down by municipality, district or cell, however large the numbers. See Describing an audience.

Comparing across countries

One method and one schema cover every country, so Lisbon and Luleå are answered the same way. Two things to keep in mind:

• Money doesn't cross borders. Amounts are in local currency. Use quartiles and deciles to compare.
• Baselines are local by default. A lift in an answer about Munich is against Germany, or against the places you compared it with, never silently against Europe. The answer names its baseline. See Reading an answer.

A few territories are still being added, and where a region's spatial layer is incomplete the answer carries a coverage note saying so. What's inside has the list.

Next

• How to understand a place: a site, a catchment, a neighbourhood.
• How to choose between locations: comparing and ranking.