What a better place than my first post on the blog to introduce the topic I would like to talk about from now on:  Location Intelligence. Location Intelligence (LI) is the capacity to organize and understand complex events through the use of geographic relationships inherent in all information.

“80% of all data stored in corporate databases has a spatial component” – Franklin, Carl and Paula Hane

This goal is achieved mainly by means of thematic maps generated combining location-related data with other business data. Thematic maps, as observed by Barbara Petchenik, are maps that tell a story about place more than merely describe where something is located in space .

“Everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things” – first law of geograhy by Waldo Tobler

Now, because a picture is worth  a thousand worlds, I wont try to describe  in more details what a thematic map is but I will jump directly to a couple of pretty famous example of them. The first one comes from London physician John Snow. Snow’s cholera map of 1854 is the best known example of using thematic maps for analysis.

Starting with an accurate base map of a London neighborhood which included streets and pump locations, Snow mapped out the incidents of cholera death. The emerging pattern centered around one particular pump on Broad Street. At Snow’s request, the handle of the pump was removed, and new cholera cases ceased almost at once. What an incredible insight!

The second example of (early) thematic mapping comes from Charles Joseph Minard who portrays the losses suffered by Napoleon’s army in the Russian campaign of 1812.

Beginning at the Polish-Russian border, the thick band shows the size of the army at each position. The path of Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow in the bitterly cold winter is depicted by the dark lower band, which is tied to temperature and time scales. Minard’s map tells a rich, coherent story with its multivariate data (six variables are plotted), far more enlightening than just a single number bouncing along over time.

The analytical power of thematic map should emerge in all its evidence from these two hand made visualization works produced far more than a century ago. Today, thanks to modern technology, spatial data is pretty much ubiquitous, easy to be found and manipulated. As consequence it has become cost effective to produce computer based high interactive thematic map. Here are some good examples of them:

1. San Francisco Crimespotting
2. The growth of Walmart across America
3. World Freedom Atlas

However, despite of the general awareness of the incredible opportunities  provided by location intelligence, technological and cultural barriers still exist and slow down its wild adoption into the enterprise world. That’s quite normal when two different world like GIS and BI, that have evolved and prospered  so long time one apart from the other, come together. I hope that the communities that are behind this two popular software stack can meet halfway, break down the barriers that divide them and create new wonderful technologies. I will try to give my humble contribution toward this aim talking about BI, GIS and Location Intelligence in this blog.