“Location Intelligence” – The geographical component in Business Intelligence

What is “Location”?
“Location” relates to tagging and storing pieces of raw data with their specific location.

What is “Intelligence”?
“Intelligence” relates to turning raw data into information.

How to turn raw data into information?
By filtering the raw data for accuracy, structuring it consistently and storing it for easy accessibility.

What is “Location Intelligence”?
Visualizing the raw data on a MAP using the “Location” information.

Location Intelligence – courtesy wikipedia

How is “Location Intelligence” foraying into “Business Intelligence”?
By combining the concepts and methods from GIS and BI to develop a platform for enabling more comprehensive location data analysis.

Examples and one of the first implementations of Location Intelligence?
Traffic analysis and real-time routing.

Some of the high profile “Location Intelligent” Services are: social checkins (e.g. foursquare), crowd sourcing geo content (Google Places), local search (Where.com) and local advertising/deals (Groupon).

Hope these questions get you start thinking about “Location Intelligence” in relation to “Business Intelligence”. In the next post, we’ll look at the value creation in merging the two domains.