Location intelligence is the extra insight gained from knowing exactly where something happened in addition to what and when. COVID-19 is the best recent example whereby the knowledge that someone was infected is greatly enhanced by knowing where they were infected. That “where” component sheds light on why and how, whilst enabling a path to discovering others who may have been exposed to infection.
Almost a decade ago Mapcite was one of the first geospatial data analytics platforms that was purpose built for the web. In fact, Mapcite lays claim to being one of, if not the first, broad users of the phrase “location intelligence”. Of course, that phrase may have been occasionally used prior by the specialist GIS application developers and data scientists but hadn’t really been synonymous within the business user geospatial community.
Apart from the COVID-19 use case noted, there are many commercial and social use cases for location intelligence which in essence address one of three key areas:
- Resource optimisation
- Emergency services, transport, education, infrastructure planning, health services, marketing program management
- Risk management
- Catastrophic events eg storms, droughts, floods, earthquakes, bushfire, climate change
- Terrorism eg predictive modelling, likely impact/consequences, response management
- Emergency services personnel safety eg Police, Paramedics, Nurses
- Customer engagement and insight
- Social issues such as depression, alcoholism, domestic violence
- Lifestyle habits, patterns, and trends
- Personalised targeted marketing
It easy to deduce the importance of “where” when reading the brief descriptions of the above areas: this is location intelligence. However, there are many ways to extract the insight that is available from location intelligence. The following images show just a few examples of how location intelligence can be presented to a user.
Geofencing
Heat Map of Insurance Holdings exposure in central Sydney, Australia
Location Pin Data
Defined areas based on a range of data attributes for resource allocation eg marketing budget, policing, emergency services
Each visualisation within Mapcite has a range of menu options for business users
Location intelligence has rapidly come of age for general business use with solutions such as Mapcite continuing to evolve.