Point of Interest (POI) data is a critical source in urban geography for uncovering city structure and reflecting patterns of urban activity. Assessing and enhancing the effectiveness of POI data is fundamental. However, most current methods for evaluating POI validity rely on static reference data, and overlook the dynamic change of POIs, especially replacement by similar categories, a type of change that can be referred to as homogeneous substitution. This omission reduces both the accuracy and credibility of evaluation results. To identify the extent to which homogeneous substitution affects the evaluation of POI validity, this study designs a comparative experiment using POI data from Changzhou, China. Validity was evaluated under two conditions, with and without considering homogeneous substitution, and the results show that incorporating homogeneous substitution into the evaluation framework increased the validity estimate by approximately 13.8%, and the standard error was about 0.4% lower than the method excluding homogeneous substitution. These findings reveal the issue of underestimating of POI validity in traditional static verification and demonstrate the essential role of dynamic change in POI validity evaluation, offering an insightful direction for improving existing evaluation systems. Meanwhile, it also contributes to improving the realism of POI functional representation and enhances our understanding of urban functional structures and their processes of renewal and continuity.
Qiu et al. (Tue,) studied this question.