Manifesto of the GeoBI initiative, the open community making open source Location Intelligence adoption pervasive

What's Location Intelligence?

The term Location Intelligence (LI) refers to all those processes, technologies, applications and practices capable to combine spatial data (GIS - Geographical Information System) with business data (BI - Business Intelligence), in order to gain critical insights, to better support decisional processes and to optimize business activities.

Objectives

GeoBI initiative is a joint effort of companies, organizations, projects’ communities and individuals set up to:

• improve the coordination work in the Location Intelligence area
• disseminate BI knowledge in the GIS world and vice-versa
• promote the integration between BI and Geographical Systems
• strengthen connections among members and support new business opportunities
• create a research network focused on Location Intelligence
• turn research results into innovative enterprise-level applications.

Principles

Key principles of the GeoBI initiative are:

• value proposition: we want to create new value through GIS and BI integration
• separation of concerns: we focus on the integration of GIS and BI software stacks, keeping them as decoupled as possible; reinventing GIS functionalities into existing BI suites or vice-versa is no-sense
• constant growth: we believe that LI solutions must be able to scale up functionalities and costs incrementally, focusing on the answer to real users' requirements, avoiding the all-or-nothing option
• low TCO (Total Cost of Ownership): we believe that only by reducing the TCO, the Location Intelligence can become pervasive.

Main Activities

GeoBI initiative will initially focus on the following main activities:

• involving new members and animating the internal discussion
• working with the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) in order to define new standards for Location Intelligence (spatial and business data linkage, geoMDX)
• creating an open knowledge base on Location Intelligence (wiki, whitepapers, guidelines, webinars)
• supporting the integration of a full stack of Location Intelligence solutions and tools, such as Spatial enabled DBMS, GeoETL, SOLAP, thematization engine, and others, realized through the collaborative work of its members
• disseminate the initiative results and promote the activities of the initiative members, through the website and by participating in local and international conferences.
• contributing back all extensions made to projects included in the stack
• encouraging the constitution of a service network supporting the stack.

Motivations

Location Intelligence allows to dramatically improve the quality of all the analysis performed on data explicitly or implicitly linked with the geographical dimension whose amount is estimated to be around 80% of all data stored in corporate databases. This improvement is possible thanks to the graphical representation of data directly over maps, which enables users to quickly identify patterns, trends or critical areas, with an effectiveness that would otherwise be impossible with traditional analytical tools.

However, despite the general awareness of the incredible opportunities provided by Location Intelligence, technological and cultural barriers still exist and slow down its wide adoption into the enterprise world.

GeoBI initiative aims to create an open community, composed of all the interested parties, whose primarily scope is to cooperate in order to break down these barriers and make the Location Intelligence adoption pervasive.

GeoBI initiative focuses on open source software and open standards as feasible tools to reach its goals respecting the initiative key principles. It doesn’t mean that only open source companies or actors can take part in the initiative. All companies and actors, involved in the Location Intelligence domain and basing their products on open source software and/or open standards, are more than welcome.