Location Intelligence

This article focuses on a unique site selection problem for calculating the demand of a Muslim population for locating religious facilities (mosques) as an example of services that require short walking distance. Geodecision’s senior GIS Analyst Hany A. Hassaballa shares his methodology for identifying a catchment area and determining service level capacity for sites under consideration.

Location-based data and analysis are considered so critical to the understanding of a business’ operations that business analytics software companies routinely and prominently boast maps as part of their dashboard visualization toolkits. But Gartner, the market research company, gives scant mention of the importance of location intelligence. Editor in Chief Joe Francica looks at what’s missing from its most recent “Magic Quadrant” report. 

Each year indoor positioning has created more buzz in the location-based services arena. Acquisitions and new developments suggest 2013 might be a breakthrough year for the technology. Executive Editor Adena Schutzberg shares the basics on how it works and where it might be headed.

Recently,

UK retailer, Sainsbury, with over 30 analysts, synthesizes data for demographic analyses, location planning and other applications. In this sponsored article, Annette Dellevoet, a senior analyst with Sainsbury’s Network Planning team with responsibility for assessing the viability of new sites and store investments as well as overall estate strategy, provides this review of the

Indoor Location Analytics is enjoying explosive adoption in retail, logistics, airports, healthcare and other industries. Growth is driven by new technology, smartphone ubiquity and increased market awareness. Editor in Chief Joe Francica interviewed Jonathon Rosen, business development director for WirelessWERX, who described the technology needed to capture mobile consumer data and some of the surprising uses for those data.

Bing Maps is often integrated into SharePoint sites to display different types of information, from the location of customers to advance business intelligence information. A common task that needs to be carried out at some point is geocoding the location data so it can be displayed on a map. Ricky Brundritt of Microsoft's EMEA group provides a step-by-step workflow to make it happen.

Is a geofence something a marketer or software developer draws, or is it a boundary that already exists? Executive Editor Adena Schutzberg looked into datasets from data provider Maponics, which are described by the company as predefined geofences that are ready to be used in location-based applications.

Assessing the size and breadth of the GIS market has always been challenging, “because the geographic-, geospatial-, location-based- solutions space is continuously evolving,” says Christine Easterfield, a principal analyst with the market research firm,