The Spatial Business Intelligence blog

BI Apps for the iPhone

2008-07-15T12:18:00.001-07:00

Oracle and Pentaho have announced the support for bringing business intelligence (BI) applications to the iPhone. I see this as a more important game changer that could potentially unseat RIM as the perferred business communication device that also brings location technology into the mix. While Pentaho, an open source BI application, have already created a way to integate Google Maps with their software, Oracle has been pushing Oracle Maps more than a Google Maps mashup.

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Pitney Bowes MapInfo Integrates Software with Cognos 8 Platform

2008-06-28T18:00:00.001-07:00

Location intelligence vendor adds another BI suite integration to take geospatial analysis mainstream.

Just as some advocates think it's time to take analytics mainstream, Pitney Bowes MapInfo hopes it can do the same for location intelligence. After years of selling desktop software to geospatial analysis gurus, the vendor has been attempting to push its server-based software out to a wider base of users. The latest step in that effort came yesterday as the vendor introduced a Location Intelligence Component (LIC) for the IBM Cognos 8 BI platform.

Pitney Bowes MapInfo and Cognos previously supported API-level integration between MapInfo and Cognos software, but the LIC is an out-of-the-box product that lets Cognos 8 users more easily exploit the geographic dimensions within their data. "For years we've been able to show maps in the middle of BI but this brings location intelligence right into the BI workflow," says Don Campbell, CTO at Cognos. "It's an integrated link that passes parameters back and forth between tools rather than just launching separate tools on your desktop."

The LIC makes geospatial analysis much more accessible, says Jon Winslow, director of business development at Pitney Bowes MapInfo: "Customers were telling us 'these maps are fantastic, but what do I do for reports and charts and dashboards.' The next thing they would say is 'I've already invested in this business intelligence platform and I have lots of people using it. Is there anything I can do so we don't have to maintain two separate applications?'"

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ASTEROP Changes Cumbersome Census Information Into Business Intelligence Gold

2008-06-22T17:43:00.001-07:00

ASTEROP Inc., a leader in business intelligence and predictive analytics, today announced the release of its newest business intelligence dataset, including analysis of consumer spending trends. ASTEROP’s new data, based on an innovative modeling approach, shows how consumer-facing U.S. businesses of all sizes have viable expansion opportunities despite a slow economy.

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Podcast: Oracle Business Intelligence with Spatial/MapViewer Integration

2008-05-23T15:51:00.001-07:00

In this podcast, Oracle's Spatial technology game plan will be discussed. In this podcast we are told how Aon Re Global, an Oracle customer and the largest insurance intermediary in the world, uses Oracle Spatial, Oracle Fusion Middleware MapViewer, and Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition to perform more accurate risk analysis. Aon’s Dan Schuffert will provide a specific example of how they determine the risk for customers whose policies are within or out of wind pool boundaries, such as Florida or the Carolinas.

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Franz Unveils AllegroGraph v3.0 - A Web 3.0 Database (with geospatial capabilities)

2008-05-20T04:42:00.000-07:00

Let the Web 3.0 buzz begin :

Franz, Inc. today announced the release of version 3.0 of AllegroGraph, the industry’s first RDF database to integrate GeoTemporal Reasoning and Social Networking Analytics in a high-performance persistent database for storing and querying billions of RDF statements. AllegroGraph provides solutions for customers to address the challenge of storing and combining unstructured and structured data for new Web 3.0 style applications as well as new types of Business Intelligence for the Enterprise. AllegroGraph’s “Activity Recognition” package provides a new and more powerful means for aggregating and analyzing data about individual and organizational behaviors, preferences, relationships, and spatial and temporal linkages between individuals and groups. AllegroGraph provides the core capabilities for making Web 3.0 a reality.
"AllegroGraph 3.0 is the industry's first database to combine very efficient geospatial data capabilities, temporal reasoning and social network analytics fully integrated with a new Web 3.0 style database," said Jans Aasman, CEO of Franz. "What Franz has developed in conjunction with our customers is a product that provides users an event based view on their data sets. Events here are broadly defined as things that have a particular type (meetings, communication events, purchases, financial transactions, hospital visits, terrorist attacks), a number of actors (a financial event has a payer, payee and the bank), a start time, an end time and a location where something happened. In this event view of the world our customers work with AllegroGraph to reason about the types of events, to link events and companies and people together through scalable social networking algorithms, and to link events and places through a user friendly layer of temporal reasoning rules. These events are additionally enhanced with a geospatial engine that is as fast as specialized spatial databases. AllegroGraph 3.0 has integrated all these diverse reasoning mechanisms into what we have coined the 'Activity Recognition' package."

Today's leading companies realize there is incredible value stored in their data. Utilizing and monetizing this ad hoc data has become a focus of the software industry and Web 3.0. There is increasing demand for sophisticated business analytics which can handle more than just specific, predetermined information, but also immense quantities of data from multiple data sources: relational databases and unstructured data from company email, documents, spreadsheet, drawings, etc. All of this data can quickly represent a significant amount of computational memory and complexity. Relational database technology is not designed for this and the schemas used by such databases are too rigid to allow this sort of analysis.

Franz has developed the industry's leading high performance Semantic Technologies database. AllegroGraph specializes in handling unstructured data and performing complex network analysis, all of which are not possible with more traditional relational style databases. The demand for new RDF databases is expanding rapidly with the growth of social networks, the emergence of the Semantic Web (3.0) and as companies seek more sophisticated tools to help them take advantage of their existing unstructured knowledge. AllegroGraph is uniquely positioned to capitalize on this rapidly expanding market opportunity.

Advanced Data Warehouse Design - From Conventional to Spatial and Temporal Applications

2008-05-17T06:05:00.000-07:00

Check out the new Springer book on advanced datawarehousing modeling. A part of the book is dedicated to the integration of spatial data into a data warehouse, in order to build spatial analytics application. I have just started reading it and will try to post a review when I am done.

Developing Location

2008-05-12T04:08:00.001-07:00

Location, location, location. Mapping has become an important part of software development, especially for business analytics and intelligence applications. Jon Winslow, director of business development for Pitney Bowes Software's MapInfo division, explains how it works, in this IT Link podcast....

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The Spatial & Visual Components for Effective Business Intelligence

2008-05-11T13:08:00.000-07:00

Our ability to exploit the massive amounts of complex, disparate data will never be resolved by the traditional technology we introduce or the common techniques we attempt to implement.Pie charts and other typical graphics, for example, fall short of supporting better decision making.A pie chart is simply not sufficient to interrogate a large OLAP cube or provide the necessary insight from the data pushed into our dashboards.¹

Innovative visualization technology is necessary to effectively synthesize detailed data into information and present this content in an understandable manner to users.However, for leading business intelligence (BI) environments, this visualization must be based on spatial (geographic) data. Effective BI, therefore, is dependent on the following two capabilities:

Visualization.Interrelationships, specifically those based on geographic data, that might otherwise be difficult to describe or explain, are often readily understood when visually presented.Irrelevant of how abstract or complex, effective visualization exposes the information insight.

Spatial Data. Typical BI systems handle the who, what and when, but the where is vastly underexploited.² Spatial data, the where of BI, does two things: First, it enhances the who by binding third party data from companies like Dun & Bradstreet to your existing data.Second, it enables analysis for the where.

Integrating spatial data and visualization technology delivers accurate, high impact information content.Tools like Map Intelligence, from Integeo Pty Ltd,³ foster this integration for BI applications, transforming data into human understanding and actionable insight.

Read the rest of the arcticle at Directions Magazine.