What is GeoSpatial Business Intelligence as compared to Location Intelligence

Location is a central factor in business. The location can be an address, a sales territory, a delivery route or an administrative boundary. These features can be visualized, analyzed and managed in a Geographical Information System (GIS).  

BI and GIS applications are often implemented in different units within an organization; they are being used for different purposes, by different user groups and are accessible through different tools. Although the systems often cover at least in part information on the same objects users are not able to conduct fully integrated analysis.

Location intelligence : The « Where » factor

Location Intelligence tools leverage a variety of data sources including aerial maps, geographic information systems (GIS), consumer demographics as well as a user’s own customer records. It provides a third party view of the “Where” and “Who” factor.  Popularized by business to consumer (B2C) applications, location Intelligence is experiencing rapid acceptance. While typical Business Intelligence systems handle the “Who”, “What” and “When” factors specific to the organization, the integration of BI and GIS allows for new types of analyses by adding the “Where” factor and third party data to the analyses.

It is the integration of these two solutions which enables analytics based on the “Where” factor and map-based visualization which can reveal spatial relationships, dependencies and  trends that are difficult to discover otherwise. 

• Read more - Download the White Paper "The where factor"

Empowering Data Mangement with Location intelligence

A clear vision of what will be the future of Location Intelligence is given by John Underkoffler during TED conference in Long Beach (Click here to see the presentation and visualize during 8'30 and 9'30)

Through integrating the two systems, the organization can also benefit from the data management strengths of each system:

• BI is populated through automatic procedures and can effectively handle a large variety of formats, files and huge volumes of data. Keeping the attribute data in a GIS updated, especially from different sources, is less effective;
• BI has a powerful toolkit for graphical representation of reports and analyses;
• A GIS has built in functionality for handling different spatial data formats and specific tools necessary to manage spatial data. Though it should be noted that some spatial enabled databases emerging on the market have similar capacities;
• GIS functionalities are needed to create new graphical features corresponding to new objects having a location.

The data retrieved and displayed in a Spatial Business Intelligence report or dashboard, can be limited by the same kind of filter as in a “classical” BI, e.g. the sales volume of a particular product line, in a list of given provinces during a given time.