In the second part of our geolocation data primer, we provide an overview of the technologies and challenges associated with contextualizing raw location data.

Part 1: Location data types
Part 2: POIs and geofencing
Part 3: Regulatory trends

Friendly PSA: the following information is intended as a general primer on location intelligence. If you are already a sophisticated user of this data (or are even just passably familiar with it) then there is a chance that you will not learn anything new here.

In the first part of this series, we introduced the ways in which location information (ideally coordinate-based) is generated and subsequently made available to third parties. However, raw coordinates only start to become useful once we are able to locate them in a real-world setting.

In this article, we are going to use Starbucks as a basic example. The retailer is