Paul Farrell

Despite rapid advancement, the spatial information industry continues to face significant hurdles convincing the corporate world that GIS can add business value. Traditionally considered a niche tool used by technical specialists to support a business, GIS now has the potential to move beyond being an operational overhead into being a tool that demonstrates compliance and increases efficiency. This paper illustrates how spatial information can be a powerful support to business strategy and execution in the corporate world. It explores the example of a publicly listed Australian forestry company, which has used spatial information at all levels of its business to provide a strategic competitive advantage in risk management and operational efficiency. The company has reduced costs per hectare by 400% to manage the estate. In the same way that enterprise systems, such as SAP, permeate throughout an organization, this case study demonstrates the potential of spatial information technology to add enormous value when implemented with vision and commitment.

My guarantee is that the audience will walk away having a clear understanding (from a technical and human perspective) of how to get spatial information used and valued at the top levels of business. The company has reduced costs per hectare by 400% to manage the estate. They saved $675,000 in chemical spraying in the first year by being able to correctly calculate the area to be sprayed. Better management of cashflow.

Kam Wong

ISO Inc. is both a user and a solution provider of GIS technologies, and has recognized the value of large-scale geographic data collection in solving business problems. This presentation will describe hands-on GIS data development and maintenance in a real-world setting. Both we and our customers need accurate information on fire protection area boundaries, fire station locations, response boundaries for fire departments, the location of fire hydrants or other water sources, and detailed onsite community gradings and statistical loss evaluations to effectively underwrite and price property insurance policies. Inaccurate assignment of such data can result in millions of dollars of premium and insured loss.

Without GIS technology, accurate assessment is tremendously difficult and error prone. Collecting and maintaining fire community data is like changing tires at 60 miles an hour: there are more than 26,000 fire districts, 45,000 protected areas, 50,000 fire stations—and thousands of miles of water mains are laid every year. A moving target. ISO has developed several vehicles to ensure timely data maintenance:

1. On-Site Community Grading: ISO visits and grades virtually every fire community in America and grades them to a national standard that is filed with departments of insurance in all 50 states. About 100 field representatives are involved in these gradings and detailed geographic data is collected during every visit.
2. Field Verification: ISO employs more than 500 commercial property field representatives who access our GIS data for each building they survey. They use the data for their reports and also check the validity data for each building. This is done about 250,000 times each year.
3. Boundary Mods: More than 20% of fire protection area boundaries coincide with the local, political community boundaries. These communities have been identified and several public and commercial sources are used to check boundary changes on an ongoing basis.
4. Survey of Water Authorities: ISO surveys water companies throughout the country to determine where new mains are being installed.
5. Community Outreach Program: ISO contacts fire protection areas by phone and through a detailed questionnaire/map every 2 years and receives a response rate up to 65%. We make more than 12,000 geographic changes to our GIS files every year.
6. Protection Connection: ISO maintains an automated, email-driven customer inquiry platform that collects and logs any challenges to the accuracy of our data and follows up on every one. More than 150 insurers and hundreds of insurance agents have access to this system.
7. Fire Chief Online: We offer a website that provides GIS based maps of fire protection areas that allow Fire authorities to log in and make updates.

The combination of in-house and customer use gives us a unique advantage for data maintenance. We have learned to maintain this national fire community data “the hard way”, through trial and error, and we’re now confident that it’s one of the best maintained GIS datasets in the country. Our “lesson learned” is that proper maintenance is both very expensive and well worthwhile. Results speak for themselves. Every one of our field representatives uses our GIS to save time in conducting surveys and to provide meaningful updates to us. And our insurer customers have completely embraced the system. More than 150 insurers have built our service into their new business and renewal processing operations and our data has been used to assign underwriting and pricing information on more than 50 million properties in the US.

Success in delivering our fire community GIS services to our customers led us to expand our GIS services and we’ve done so with similar attention to detail. Our FireLine datasets, for example, are developed from ground-truthed assessment of raw satellite imagery coupled with information about fire spread and wildland growth around cul de sacs and near new subdivisions. And our custom coastline definitions use our Angle of Impact Measurement (AIM) technology that has been endorsed by the Connecticut department of insurance. The presenter will discuss these services very briefly, as an educational tool re: GIS data development.

I plan on providing participants with a hands-on review of complex GIS data maintenance for the most widely used GIS datasets in the insurance industry. The data maintenance tools we developed have increased the number of geographic changes to our database by tenfold and at a lower cost on implementation since we began the project. This results in the ultimate win-win; a better tool for our employees and customers, and a less costly operation internally.

Philip Pridmore Brown

Too much water is going down urban storm drains. New infrastructure (pipes, processing and storage) cannot be put in place fast enough or cost effectively enough to address the increasing demand (caused by covering more surface area in urban areas). There needs to be a new approach as City Water Bureaus are facing exponentially growing EPA fines while trying to service increasing populations. Historical infrastructure approaches will not scale into the next decade. Community participation in these critical systems is required.

The solution involves urban resident participation; examining, evaluating, modeling and discovering individual contributions that can be made for both economic and environmental impact. This solution uses GIS data (lot line, house layout, soil type amongst others) as a palette for water exploration. Users of the system can configure their lots with water retaining plants, planters and collection devices while dynamically assessing their savings and contributions. They can compare their water impact with their neighbors and easily see coupons and incentives for actions.

As actions are taken, water bureau providers can interactively assess water infrastructure needs and configure their incentive programs to maximize participation and minimize costs. The most difficult challenges of implementation and delivery are social challenges; water bureaus are simply not familiar with interactive decision support dashboards or web-based community participation models. But as the storm water management costs decrease, they learn quickly and broaden their use across different application groups within the bureau.

I will use a GIS foundation to show a paradigm shifting - in a fun and interactive way - to positively engage the community in dealing with expensive and critical infrastructure systems. While the system is just in the deployment process, well before LI2008, we will have participation results, infrastructure cost savings, and storm water visibility numbers for one, possibly two water bureaus.

Robert Cheetham

The Philadelphia Police Department (PPD) established its Crime Analysis Unit in 1997 with a goal of using GIS to track and analyze crime across the city. However, the three person unit was limited in its ability to address the needs of the 7,000 officer police force attempting to tackle nearly 2 million incidents each year. Understanding these limitations, the PPD sought to develop an automated system using statistical data mining techniques to enable more rapid discovery and communication of geographic patterns in crime, leveraging existing investment in web-based crime analysis.

This presentation will focus on HunchLab, a web-based statistical crime spike detector application. The software solution uses GIS technology to nightly comb millions of police incident records, look for recent, geographically clustered crime frequencies outside the norm, and alert police captains of these spikes. The Spike Detector was built using ESRI’s ArcIMS and ArcEngine but moves beyond the core GIS functionality by applying advanced spatial statistics and data mining to identify changes in geographic clustering of crime events and intuitive user interface design to enable application use by non-GIS experts. Beyond simply detecting hot spots in crime, HunchLab analyzes changes in crime density over time and highlights locations where the change is statistically significant, providing early warning of crime spikes or places where crime density is higher than expected based on historical knowledge of the area.

HunchLab has proven to be especially useful in detecting crime clusters that span district boundaries. Whereas many district captains keep well versed in the happenings of their own districts, crime spikes on the borders are more likely to go unnoticed. HunchLab not only finds these crime spikes but also alerts command staff on both sides of these arbitrary administrative lines, resulting in more effective deployment decisions. While HunchLab was initially designed for urban police work, the concepts and algorithms used for this project are broadly applicable to users in law enforcement, homeland security, public health, defense, and business. In Philadelphia, the Department of Records plans to apply this technology to the detection of geographic spikes in property conveyance fraud. Businesses would be able to use it for detection of spikes or anti-spikes in customer behaviors, target markets, or other relevant events. I am going to demonstrate how the Philadelphia Police Department uses HunchLab to identify unusual clusters of criminal activity.

Tim Case

This presentation will define the current state of 3D city model practices worldwide and the major technology domains that enable and inhibit future potentials. Specific focus will be on the 3D Information Management standards being led by the Open Geospatial Consortium and its partners. Participants will come away from the talk with a clear understanding of what, how and why 3D standards are vital to the future of our industry. Several examples will be shown which each have business successes and lessons learned that will be shared.

Bernt Wahl

A neighborhood is a place built on identity. Neighborhoods [generally] conjure ideas of a geographic character. Some neighborhoods build identities through culture, age and heritage. Others base their existence on location, a hill, a seaside or a seedy part of town. Each one provides a unique character with a story. Neighborhood Map in Search Internet services become more users focused; the need to provide greater localized content has expanded the requirements for more neighborhoods demographic information has also increased. Two key elements driving targeted localized interest are: consumer neighborhood name recognition and neighborhood demographic consistency. By supplying data based on defined locations with common characteristics – which consumers are familiar with - companies and service organizations will be able to target these communities and their inhabitants more effectively. I will show several processes used to define and map neighborhoods for US Cities. I will discuss why this neighborhood data is important for granular search, real estate, social networking, and public health.

Gene Culbertson

By optimizing retail location performance with the perfect marriage of technology and data, I'll discuss how to acquire and retain your best customers through dynamic use of geographical information. From building score cards to creating forecast models, including the competitions' impact in the area, you'll have the right tools to identify best customers, including lifestyle behaviors and preferences, determine the optimal combination of offers for each site, tailor communication strategy, channels and message by offering, analyze current and future consumer demand in new geographic markets and assess new market opportunities, evaluation potential, market size and risks.

Raisa Suhir

About 40% of households use more than one bank. To assess attrition risk and growth opportunities within their footprints most of the banks rely on internal data and historic market data. Market research data incorporates information on potential changes within the footprint. This information is essential for retention and acquisition programs. My presentation is focused of methodology of incorporating consumer financial decisions surveys into location intelligence domain. I guarantee that, as a result of our presentation, participants will understand how market research findings provide insights to local intelligence and improve marketing ROI.

Mike Swartz

First American Flood Data Services (FAFDS) is the nation’s leading provider of flood zone determinations to the mortgage lending and insurance industries, performing over 40,000 determinations each day. Its service relies on Flood Insurance Rate Maps that are published by FEMA in paper form. Success depends on accurately converting that data into digital form and precisely locating a property in relation to a flood zone. Until the mid-1990’s FAFDS was a fully manual operation, receiving its orders on paper faxes and looking each one up by hand in Austin, Texas.

Today, all orders are transmitted electronically, better than 9 of every 10 addresses are located and assigned the correct FEMA flood automatically, and the remainder are processed by a global team of map analysts using sophisticated proprietary mapping tools. Along the way, FAFDS has deployed industry-leading spatial tools, created the most accurate set of flood zone polygons available, developed finely tuned address matching techniques, and is completing a national digital land parcel database.

As a result the marginal cost to render a flood determination has gone from dollars to essentially zero for the vast majority of orders that are fully automated. At the same time, those determinations have become more accurate, a key factor when a single wrong flood zone carries a potential liability of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Geospatial technologies have allowed FAFDS to remain the leader in an increasingly commoditized industry and have added millions to the bottom line. And they are the foundation for a whole family of natural hazard risk management products coming to market. Mike Swartz has been the CIO of FAFDS since 1993. The presentation will trace the company’s technological evolution and provide lessons for all enterprises that provide or use geospatial products and services.

Streamlined business processes brought millions to the bottom line, maintained company's leadership in an increasingly commoditized business, and led to new natural hazard risk products.

Ron Di Grandi

I was presenting a number's based presentation with bars, graphs and pie charts to all employees at a meeting one day to show them where we were at in meeting goals, and I could tell they were about as excited with hearing the data as watching paint dry. Even though the data was factual and told a clear story, I couldn't feel the excitement, concern and enthusiasm that I was wanting from them. So I decided to use a new approach, looking at data geographically. The process I designed is called Advanced Penetration Mapping (A.P.M.) through Multi-Level Range Targeting (M.L.R.T). The A.P.M. process has performed beyond my wildest expectations. In the beginning I just wanted to show data results geographically to my team so they could get a “real” geographical visual on how we were performing. But then I started overlaying maps showing performance-to-goals of one tracking area on top of other tracking areas and found that I was discovering enormous amounts of new data that I had never seen before. I discovered that tracking results geographically for individual products and services, overlaying the mapping results on top of each other month after month, then cross-comparing results unlocks a new world of “Activity Data”. It is this “Activity Data” that excited all employees to perform at new levels. Activity Data is data that displayed through a color coded process that is connected to pre-established target ranges and displayed geographically to your territory. For example, when I was tracking video penetration every month, I measured our penetration percentage to year end goal. I established a Tri-Level Range target. Level 1 is goal and over (Solid). Level 2 is penetration within 10% of goal (with-in range). Level 3 is more than 10% of achieving goal (distress). I then connected the ranges to node level boundaries within our division. You now display a beautiful, easy-to-understand colorful display of where you are and are not meeting year-end budget from day 1.

This now completely changes how you can approach your business. You can now target all Marketing, Direct Sales, Tap Audit and Business Development functions to target areas for optimal performance. This eliminates much of the mass marketing aspect. It eliminates sending Direct Sales in to low performance sales areas. It directs Tap Audit to areas of greater potential for unauthorized service discoveries. You can target securing Business contracts, and on and on. In addition, with using this new A.P.M. process, you’re achieving optimal performance from your employees, which reduces overhead and expenses. Finally, since all departments are communicating from the same mapping system, there is a connection of department communication and synergies like never before. The A.P.M. process will be displayed and explained through a Power Point presentation at the Location Intelligence and Map World conferences.

I'm going to show you a process that unlocks hidden data that will enable you to make much more educated decisions for optimal results. I was able to cut marketing expenses; increase revenue per subscriber; pinpoint optimal Audit activity; pinpoint optimal Direct Sales activity; connect department synergies; discover all "distress areas"; discover all Solid retention areas"; discover all "Churn areas"; discover all areas that stayed "within range" of meeting budget; identified unseen competitive activity; identified unseen product subscriber activity and much, much more. Most importantly, this process excited all employees to perform at the next level.

Paul Bissett

Off-line archives of geospatial data and case-by-case negotiation of derivative rights have stunted the growth of the geospatial intelligence industry. WeoGeo proposes a two-fold solution: First, create discoverable repositories of your geodata resources. Sharing rather than hiding your data inventory enables cost centers to become revenue centers. Navigable repositories also improve internal efficiency, giving knowledge workers a catalog of what is already owned. Second, allow derivative-rights licensing with full protection and payment to the data originator. Giving second generation downstream users permission to alter the work with payment but without further negotiation will increase sales of your geodata assets and improve efficiency. With the Information Revolution, knowledge workers have become an important asset and a deciding factor in the success of any venture. Thus, maximizing the productivity of those workers has become a paramount concern for C-level executives. Billions of dollars are spent on software each year to improve this efficiency and gain competitive advantage. The geospatial intelligence industry has grown with this investment in giving knowledge workers the tools that they need to perform well.

In the geospatial intelligence industry, those tools transform raw geospatial data into knowledge and then into intelligence. The first step is in the creation or acquisition of raw inputs. These data are then combined and transformed to make them meaningful and finally, the results are communicated in a way that helps make decisions. We’ve seen exponential growth in the efficiency of the last two steps in this process but not in the first. The geospatial industry has not seen the productivity gains that have been evident in other consumer and professional markets resulting from computer enhancements and the internet. Lagging behind are improvements in the search, acquisition, and sharing of raw inputs. Geospatial knowledge workers waste valuable time groping about for these inputs. Once a cache is found, more time is wasted attempting to estimate the applicability, examine the metadata, and decipher the rights-of-use. This inefficiency within our industry is slowing its expansion and importance in the markets that it serves. Compounding this problem is the vertical nature of our geospatial markets. Different industries require different tools and analysis techniques to transform raw data into intelligence, which results in market niches. However, the raw inputs for these techniques, the base geodata and the means for their discovery, needn’t be isolated in these market silos. The pain and expense endured by an Oil and Gas Company in acquiring an air-photo, properly registering and documenting it with metadata should not be re-experienced by a telecommunications company. This expense in acquisition should be recouped by reselling the product rather than duplicated by a company unaware of the existence of the geodata. Lastly, the value-added geodata content in one industry is often the raw material in another. For example, the creation of ortho-rectified imagery products requires detailed information on elevation. The elevation is a value-added product for LiDAR vendors, but it is a raw product for ortho-imagery production. The ortho-rectified imagery and elevation products are both raw products for a value-added product of an efficient route plan for a new highway. The efficient discovery and exchange of geodata between vertical markets in this manner significantly reduces the cost of geo-product creation, increasing margins and return on investment for all market participants.

A demonstration of this solution can be seen in a five minute Flash screen-cast.

I will outline a two-fold problem in the geospatial industry and that is costing millions (billions?) of dollars in decreased worker productivity and lost revenue. This case-study and proposal show a path to demonstrable improvements in knowledge worker productivity, reduction of costs, and increases in revenue.

Bruce Bartlett

The Columbus Dispatch needed to create smaller advertising zones consistent with ZIP Code boundaries to offer advertisers and potential advertisers more finitely defined ad zone areas to target their advertisements. Simultaneously we were severing our relationship with our "youth" carriers to move to an all adult independent contractor model of distribution. We reviewed our delivery areas using Route Smart and NAVTEQ data to develop more efficient contiguous routes while shifting boundaries to cover the distribution holes of relatively small routes created by the departure of our youth carriers. We wanted these transitions to be transparent to our subscribers and to try and retain the adult contractors which already made up about 30% of our distribution force. The route plans we developed in Route Smart then had to be faithfully replicated by manipulation of the system "router" in DSI which is our circulation main frame system. It was necessary to work closely with our field staff to insure smooth implementation and the entire process was done in stages so as to not disrupt our daily delivery flow. The results yielded more advertising options for the smaller businesses that previously could not afford to advertise with us. This process also resulted in newspaper delivery areas which average 175 daily customers and 285 Sunday customers. These numbers allow an attractive profit for our contractors but are not so large as to jeopardize our on-time delivery guarantees to our subscribers.

I am going to reveal some problems and solutions we have encountered at The Columbus Dispatch in an atmosphere of increased audience fragmentation. The Internet and niche publications have forced newspapers to be increasingly efficient and innovative to hold on to their readers.

Scott Sedlik

INRIX’s predictive modeling capabilities, coupled with the nation’s most extensive traffic data flow archive, allow for unique analysis of some of the nation’s most important issues such as emergency response planning, economic forecasting and major urban transportation planning to name a few. Beyond Personal Navigation, mobile navigation and telematics, Bayesian Network Analysis has real world implications for pre-planning and developing real-time operational scenarios that are valuable for a wide variety of applications. Individuals and businesses can improve productivity and save time by leveraging and/or analyzing real-time and predictive traffic data.

In this discussion I will cover a variety of "what-if" scenarios where Bayesian analysis has been applied to problem solve such situations as aging highway infrastructures, retail location planning and development based on different data types including flow, incident and predictive, as well as analysis of movement of freight and fleet vehicles as an indicator of economic conditions.

This case study illustrates a new tool – INRIX Bayesian Network Analysis Services – that is available in the battle to plan, forecast and manage mega-events such as highway infrastructure, emergency and disruptions; location planning analysis for retail locations and cost-effective delivery routing options among other less-conventional examples.

Sean Gorman

The conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan have driven home the critical need to deliver accurate and timely geographic data to the war fighter. Currently, troops struggle with out-of-date maps that don’t reflect important situational information, such as IED and insurgent hot spots. As a result, troops end up creating their own ad hoc maps with GPS and other DIY technologies, often putting themselves at high risk (snipers, IEDs, ambushes) to do so. This valuable hard-earned data is difficult to share and is often lost when troops rotate out, requiring the next group to put themselves at risk collecting the data again. FortiusOne worked with a system integrator to address this problem by leveraging the GeoCommons platform to integrate OpenStreetMaps, MediaWiki, and traditional GIS data into a flexible solution that allows the war fighter to easily share field data on a GIS base map through a socially networked environment. This presentation will show how FortiusOne and its partners effectively combined innovations from the GeoWeb with traditional GIS tools to create a solution for this significant problem facing troops deployed in hazardous environments. This approach of democratizing geospatial intelligence – making tools and data easily accessible to a much broader audience than previously possible – is applicable to many other enterprise class problems. The presentation will touch briefly on solutions in some of these other areas.

This approach of democratizing geospatial intelligence – making tools and data easily accessible to a much broader audience than previously possible – is applicable to many other enterprise class problems. The presentation will touch briefly on solutions in some of these other areas.

Joel Herr

The need to share data in a timely fashion is driven to a new level during and after a disaster. The ability to do so, in a real-time, or a near real-time environment has a direct impact on lives, and improves the environment that relief worker and volunteers enter into post disaster. NVision Solutions has been active in multiple Emergency Operations Centers along the Gulf Coast both pre and post Katrina, and in Federal Disaster Centers in multiple states post Katrina. NVision has pioneered various techniques in data assimilation, distribution, and product delivery out of sheer necessity. Active in the post Katrina "lessons learned" research, NVision has selected Leica's TITAN product to resolve multiple issues surrounding timely data sharing, ownership issues, and distribution issues. Geospatial technologies have escalated in importance within the emergency management arena largely due to the wide spread use in response to Hurricane Katrina. This presentation will outline some Geospatial success stories and some areas where we could have done better. TITAN resolves numerous data sharing gaps in Emergency Response but we I will also outline how NVision uses TITAN technology to promote data usage within the company and data sales to external customers.

JS Turcotte

This presentation will focus on the business problem of accurate data analysis in existing commercial BI tools. Knowing that roughly 80% of the data has a location component, it makes a lot of sense to add a location analysis component to a business intelligence reporting tool such as Cognos, Microstrategy. However, adding a map simply for display purposes is like adding just another chart. To be very useful, a mapping application as part of a BI tool must provide advanced functionality such as drill down, geographic filtering and bi-directionality. The presentation will address, through a live demonstration, the advantages of providing a complete mapping tool as part of the Cognos BI and the roadmap for such an implementation.

Todd Schmitt

BI can create competitive advantage for a firm but historically, enterprises have underutilized location information in their decision-making for many reasons, including cost and complexity. Now, many factors are moving spatial awareness into BI, including the fact that spatial data can now be stored in standard databases and accessed and managed like any other enterprise data. According to a market research firm, business analytics has become a top spending priority for many companies and location intelligence is fast becoming a 'must-have.'

The presentation will be a survey of the current Business Intelligence environment as well as a discussion of the role location intelligence will play in future implementations. Location intelligence, as part of the BI suite, teases out valuable information that is impossible to see in basic spreadsheet analyses. That information helps businesses perform more efficiently using fewer resources.

Steven Pierce

Our customer expressed a need to visually represent business intelligence data without changing their BI infrastructure. In short, they needed unobtrusive spatial mapping that could work with any data source. Using Oracle MapViewer's non-spatial data provider we were able to join attribute data from their BI reports to spatial data stored in another database. The MapViewer AJAX client library allowed us to readily render data from the spatial database and represent that associated attribute data thematically. The core enabling technology for this implementation was Oracle's Non-Spatial Data provider. We will perform a live demonstration of an application using this technology and show the few lines of code that were required to get it working.

Participants will learn about Oracle's non-spatial data provider, an enabling technology, within the Oracle Spatial/MapViewer suite. Participants will see a live demonstration of how this enabling technology can be used. The customer saved the cost of migrating their BI tool to a product that supported native mapping and now have a mapping solution that will work for all of their applications.

Joel MacIntosh

The problem: Real Estate is a highly competitive industry. Brokers and Agents alike are looking for ways to stand out from a crowd. While it may seem that the entire real estate industry is already map focused, the truth is that 30% of Broker websites still don’t have mapping and 70% of real estate sites don’t have property searches that use maps. This is especially surprising in an industry where location is the key to every product sold. However, "map-based search" is has become a key differentiator on real estate websites and has quickly proven to be valuable to both the consumer and to the real estate professional.

Details on Solution: WolfNet has found a way to increase competitive advantages for real estate brokers and agents via their map-based property search. I will discuss how MapTracks provides a map-based property search on the Internet without requirements for client-side IT expertise or support. MapTracks is an efficient way for Real Estate consumers to more effectively find the properties that they want. MapTracks is currently deployed on 1,000s of real estate websites which generate 250,000 map views each day. Link to example/live demo: http://www.rogerfazendin.com/search.cfm - Minnesota's largest independent family-owned real estate company Keller Williams (WK) Real Estate is the 5th largest real estate company in the US. KW provides their Brokers and Agents with the opportunity to implement MapTracks and generate the benefit the map-based search on their real estate sites.

I will show attendees the difference between typical real estate mapping and map-based search on websites. WolfNet's solution supports nearly 4 million Real Estate listings and 15+ million photos bringing an enormous amount of data into one easy to use solution for both their clients and consumers. I will demonstrate how WolfNet used the MapQuest API as a platform and integrated additional data such as MLS listings and Points of Interest to allow consumers to create a unique interactive experience for Real Estate consumers. I will also show how ‘simpler can be better’ and that mapping technology can become too sophisticated.

Bryan Vais

For years, retailers have been making critical decisions on store expansion, property acquisition/leasing and marketing based on flat, static information. Sometimes, this data is upwards of 15 years old, and is provided by several vendors. Despite the age of the information, the accuracy of the data has rarely been questioned. In today’s rapidly changing retail environment, there are many new challenges forcing professionals in sales network management to rethink their development strategies to keep pace. These changes include: the profound changes in the socio-economic scene and commercial urbanism, the materialization of globally familiar trade names, the new regulatory context, the birth of new sales concepts, changes in consumer behavior with more flexibility and opportunism, and customers whose standards are increasingly higher.

Businesses have found that they need to use predictive analytics to maximize their revenue potential. Predictive analytics is an area of statistical analysis that focuses on extracting information from data and using it to forecast future trends and behavior patterns. The core of predictive analytics relies on capturing relationships between explanatory variables and the predicted variables from past occurrences, and exploiting it to predict future outcomes. Predictive analytics encompasses a range of techniques from statistics and data mining that process current and historical data in order to make predictions about future events. In business, the models often process historical and transactional data to identify the risk or opportunity connected to a precise customer or transaction. These analyses weigh the relationship between many data elements to isolate each customer’s risk or potential, which guides the action on that customer. Predictive analytics is widely used in making customer decisions.

Predictive analytics is used in many industries including: insurance, telecommunications, retail, travel, healthcare, pharmaceuticals and other fields.

Census data is the basis for which business intelligence and geoIntelligence solutions are being applied. Unfortunately, the last U.S. Census was completed in 2000 and without the ability to apply new science and modeling like Asterop, data remains outdated. The end result of this is that revenue opportunities for all retail businesses are left on the table. This data is something that businesses in the U.S. cannot afford to take a chance on. This presentation will discuss the need for accurate predictive analytics and the effect of incorrect data on the present and future U.S. retail landscape. I will look at cutting-edge estimation techniques for an accurate demographic picture across the U.S. and how companies can tailor product and marketing strategies for individual sales outlets based on the specifics of local market dynamics. I will also demonstrate how using this technology will allow retailers in the U.S. to have the ability to instantly recognize voids in the marketplace for stores, optimal merchandise offerings, and under-penetrated business opportunities and use this information to increase their revenue.

In this presentation, I am going to take the attendees through the process of gathering accurate predictive analytics for their businesses and why it is important that all businesses have access to correct and accurate data. Attendees will learn of the immediate need for accurate predictive analytics and the effect of incorrect data on the present and future U.S. retail landscape. This study will look at cutting-edge estimation techniques for an accurate demographic picture across the U.S. and how companies can tailor product and marketing strategies for individual sales outlets based on the specifics of local market dynamics.

Jeff Bradford and John Cirincione

The real estate market is undergoing considerable change due to the current crisis in the mortgage industry. One critical component in the lending process is the valuation of the property that serves as collateral for the loan. If this valuation is incorrect, and the loan goes into default, lenders could lose millions of dollars. So central to the collateral valuation process is the real estate appraiser who is charged with determining the value of the property. Real estate appraisers are experts at determining the value of properties, but only of properties that are within their designated coverage areas. Moreover, lenders fear exposure to increased risk levels when appraisers move out of their designated coverage area. This points to a critical geo-spatial component that is directly related to forecasting an appraiser’s competency level and the level of risk a lender assumes.

This presentation will demonstrate how geo-spatial cluster analysis is applied to score an appraisers’ experience for a specific property assignment and apply a ranking methodology based on their expertise for that property. The benefit is that instead of selecting appraisers using a broad level of location criteria, selection can be based on the actual property to be valued. The result helps improve the task of assigning the most qualified appraiser and ultimately reduce the lender’s monetary risk in the event of loan default where they need to resell the property and recoup money loaned. The process using this location technology is being implemented in a nationwide directory of appraisers. Examples will be presented that will showcase the appraiser scoring process and ranking methodology that is used in this geo-spatial information system.

We will show why anyone looking for a real estate appraiser should always consider the location component when selecting the most qualified person to perform the appraisal.

The process allows for the selection of appraisers based on a score relevant to the property to be appraised. To homeowners the measured difference is in the assurance that the appraiser is qualified to do the job. To the lending community, the difference is in millions of dollars of lower risk because the property was appraised by a competent appraiser.

Emily Kahoe and Jaron Waldman

The Reinvestment Fund is a leader in making strategic investments that improve and transform neighborhoods and drive economic growth. TRF has long recognized the importance of information in driving change, and its research products center around neighborhood and regional analyses that help developers and policymakers make informed decisions about strategic investment in homes, schools and businesses. TRF's research has traditionally been delivered on a CD containing data and ready to be loaded into a traditional GIS system. The drawback of this approach was that it required costly in-house expertise in desktop GIS at the clients' end, and that data rapidly became out of date. In 2007, TRF worked with Placebase and their Pushpin platform to develop PolicyMap (www.policymap.com), a national data warehouse and mapping tool with simple, online access to data, tables, charts and powerful spatial reporting in a sophisticated, user-friendly Web platform. PolicyMap allows TRF to deliver their research and analytics on local housing and lending markets more effectively, and to a much broader audience than ever before.

We will walk participants through a demonstration of how the data PolicyMap drives improved decision making by foundations, policymakers and lenders at the local level, leading to more effective investing. PolicyMap has transformed the way TRF delivers research to its audience, decreasing costs and dramatically increasing the potential audience. PolicyMap helps its subscribers make better decisions on where to lend and where to incentivize and support lending activity.

Thomas Hayden

When you think of our everyday use of maps, we use them to get an idea of where we’re going. We’ve then educated ourselves in preparation to hunt down that location. If we are going someplace that we’ve never been before, there is always the issue that our cities are packed very densely and an address, even with an arrow on the map, is often not enough to guide you directly to the front door of your destination. There is always the final search for the right apartment, office, or building in the general area of the address. Addresses themselves are often difficult to see from the street, especially while operating a motor vehicle. Having even the roughest visual image of what your destination actually looks like can save time and reduce stress, benefits that pay dividends across the board.

Imagine that destination is your first job interview and a street-level image helps your confidence as you walk through the front door. It could make all the difference. Immersive Media has embarked on an ambitious project to provide the world with that additional piece of awareness that will help us all be just little less lost and save time that we never even realized we were losing. By inventing a new way of visually recording the world around us and empowering that data with spatial awareness, Immersive Media has removed one of the final few disconnects between the map and what it’s trying to tell us. The question is: How does one take a picture of everything, everywhere, and keep it all in order? Immersive Media is also taking Location Intelligence a step further by providing the ultimate building interior mapping solution in the web-based IM OnScene solution. IMOnScene allows administrators, management, and engineering, as well as emergency responders, to pull up immersive imagery of anywhere inside a building on demand. They may need to see what kind of ceiling tiles a particular room has? They may need to see if a SWAT team can approach a particular room undetected to clear an active shooter? Whatever needs to be seen without making the trip to the location is visible once Immersive Media has performed a walk-though and produced an IM OnScene project. The collection process is easily accomplished within hours and the software integrations requires only minutes to provide a solution much richer in visual intelligence than any floor plan or CAD drawing. I am going take participants through our processes of collecting and referencing immersive imagery in real world conditions to provide data-rich media of everything, everywhere.

Ethan Stock and Shane Green

The transformation of the Internet into a consumer phenomenon for information, entertainment, and commerce was driven by the availability of powerful search technology that allowed users to discover and interact with the individual items that they found interesting, such as e-commerce goods, news items and photographs. To date, local search has failed to reach a level of equivalent value to the individual consumer, as existing solutions have yet to reach a degree of precision which allow users to discover and navigate to the goods, services, and activities that they seek in their local area. At the same time, Internet products have failed to drive value to local advertisers at scale – as local search has yet to translate into the offer-driven context in which most local merchants operate.

There have been two critical gaps in the creation of next-generation local search capabilities – first, pedestrian mapping down to the ‘last meter’ level of complex, high-value locations, and second, searchable and timely event information which provides a real-time snapshot of ‘things to do’ occurring within a local area.

How can we deliver a local experience more akin to web search, allowing users to query and discover more than basic business listings, with broad content, themes, and related information, within a local context? Can we, in the process, significantly improve relevance and quality of results for users; finally bringing meaning to the phrase “Hyperlocal?”

NAVTEQ’s Location Content Group is pioneering the creation of detailed pedestrian maps of the exteriors and interiors of major local venues including sports stadiums, convention centers, museums, university campuses, and shopping malls.

Zvents’ unique search technology aggregates local events for entertainment, sports, retail and community activities, and powers a dynamic search experience for consumers via a network of media partners.

Recognizing the strong synergy between their joint goals of improving local search from a map and event perspective, NAVTEQ and Zvents have partnered on several commercial pilots, including complex retail and convention locations. People, places, and events are now connected with very specific temporal and geographic information, navigation, and visual representation. This session will review and discuss early results from these tests, and suggest future areas of experiment and exploration.

NAVTEQ and Zvents together will explore Hyperlocal and relevance for the future of local search, combining what, when, and where at high levels of detail and precision. Discover next generation search and mapping which brings you indoors and off-road -- showing you where to go and why to go there in a unified experience.

Marc Tremblay

There has been success with device manufacturers such as Garmin and Lowrance that have created handheld devices that incorporate satellite imagery and geospatial information for everyday consumers. More recently, satellite imagery has moved into the wireless market as devices are no longer based on single location and single use platforms and are infiltrating cell phones and in-dash navigation devices. With recent surveys and reports predicting 2008 to be a record year for the GPS market, where do geospatial products and information fit in to this growing demand? And perhaps more importantly, how can companies providing these services and products capitalize on the opportunity?

With the whole world covered with up to date high-resolution imagery, consumers can use the imagery to safely and confidently explore unfamiliar territory with context and frame of reference. Innovative companies like Garmin and Bushnell are manufacturing devices equipped with satellite imagery to provide guidance for marine and outdoor enthusiasts. Soon, GPS enabled mobile devices will have imagery as a standard feature (like the iPhone), which will eventually make imagery a cost of entry as more companies offer handheld navigation. The revenue opportunities range from making single devices more valuable with imagery (Garmin) to ad revenues enticing more advertisers (amAze).

There are a number of challenges facing companies trying to make this transition such as cost, acceptance and ease of use. DigitalGlobe’s successful partnerships with Garmin, Lowrance, Bushnell and amAze to bring high-resolution satellite imagery to information devices, applications and mobile services, give me the ability to provide invaluable insight into addressing these challenges and opportunities head on

I will take the participants through DigitalGlobe’s successful case studies with Garmin, Bushnell, amAze and Lowrance to show how to effectively reach the LBS and navigation markets while addressing each of the challenges and opportunities facing companies looking to commercialize geospatial products.

Marie-Josee Proulx

A Spatial OLAP tool can be defined as a visual platform built especially to support rapid and easy spatiotemporal analysis and exploration of data following a multidimensional approach comprised of aggregation levels available in cartographic displays as well as in tabular and diagram displays. An ideal Spatial OLAP technology must deal with spatial objects as an integrated part of the navigation and must offer capabilities to efficiently manage these spatial objects. Of all the available commercial solutions, only a few support all the capabilities required for efficient geospatial decision-support. It can be difficult for organizations to select the right tool for their needs without completing a deep analysis. The more advanced solutions integrate the management of multidimensional and spatial data and they facilitate the deployment and the update of spatial data cubes. Functionality such as automatic map creation, multimaps, spatial drill operators, and map pivots help enhance the knowledge discovery process and help the users maintain their train of thoughts. Advanced solutions also support recognized and standardized spatial data formats thus simplifying the management of the spatial data and their updates. These solutions best fit in the geomatics domain, which exploits a huge spatial data production and update flow. In the summer of 2007, the Industrial Research Chair in Geospatial Databases for Decision Support team from Université Laval (Quebec) conducted a study of commercial products supporting multidimensional analysis and cartographic visualization. The team established a number of evaluation criteria in order to distinguish commercial products that support full Spatial OLAP capabilities. The evaluation criteria are grouped in two categories: criteria related to the supported architecture and criteria related to the supported geospatial features. These evaluation criteria can be used by organizations to identify the product that will best suit their needs.

The overall process of identifying evaluation criteria through the study of commercial products will be explained and the ideal SOLAP technology requirements will be presented. At the end of the presentation, organization will be able to identify the commercial products that will best suit their needs using the evaluation criteria presented

Krishna Kumar

Enterprise ecosystems are best visualized graphically. Picture the CFO of a multi-billion company viewing his business metrics as 3D graphs, alerts, CAD drawings on a Google Earth based dashboard. He can set profit alerts, monitor campaigns, indulge in demographics using a rich SOA (mashup) based data assembly tool. He can set camera rules that enable him to auto-zoom into areas of interest, for example a supermarket where his product penetration is questionable. Using space and time based animation capability, he can do "day in the life of a user" simulations, walk though a virtual supermarket and get a sense for shelf visibility of his product.

Dale Lutz

Spatial ETL (extract, transform, load) is commonly used to move data between file formats and databases where it has demonstrated significant value in enabling users to get access to the data that they need in the format that they need it in. The key challenges many organizations now face is in how best to leverage data provided by web services and to address the ever-evolving spatial data access needs from different stakeholders. This presentation outlines how FME, a spatial ETL platform, can be used on both the client and server side to address these challenges. On the client side, I’ll demonstrate how to use FME to extract spatial data from websites and to send data back to websites using http: requests. On the server side the FME 2008 Server inherits all the capabilities of the platform in addition to providing a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) for easy application integration. The services that are supported include OGC standards, as well as SOAP, REST, .Net, Java, C, C++, and others. The strength of this solution is the ability to bring together data from over 200 different sources, transform the data into the data model and format required by the web service and then provide the data to the client application or user. All this is done in real-time.

SJ Camarata

As more and more organizations, both in the private and government sectors adopt and implement both Enterprise GIS and Web Based GIS, Business Process Improvement (BPI) methodologies become ever more important. In reality, almost all organizations that implement these new systems go through a BPI effort. Sometimes this process is conscious, well planned, managed and tracked. Other times, it happens ‘by default’ as organizations plan for and carry out the necessary changes, improvements and adjustments as they move to the Web and the enterprise. More and more IT organizations are either managing or working with GIS operations and BPI becomes even more important as GIS’ are integrated with and become a fundamental and underpinning component of IT infrastructure. This can become even more prevalent as organizations implement and integrate GIS and IT Enterprises that include underlying Web based tiers as part of their systems.

Brian Timoney

Traditional Enterprise IT has largely succeeded in developing systems to store and capture a company's raw data, and has largely failed to deliver that data as usable information to its decision-makers. Clunky interfaces and disparate data silos leave intended users frustrated, resulting in an ever-longer trail of unused "solutions." Using case studies from the energy industry, I'll show how the latest Web mapping interfaces are being used as unifying, visual portals to systems ranging from production reporting to document management to land resource monitoring. Just as important, the ease-of-use of these map interfaces lead to increased uptake among upper management since they finally have a tool that provides both a synoptic visual overview of prevailing patterns as well as easy drill-down to detailed information without needing a user’s manual or special training. I'll show how a Fortune 300 company is using Google Earth to not only visualize its operations in a straightforward "dots on a map" manner but also hook into their document management and production surveillance systems that increase their usage, especially amongst upper management.

David Wright

Geospatial digital content is becoming the primary asset base for many organizations, including National Geographic. Managing and delivering digital assets requires a nimble asset management system - one that can handle all kinds of digital assets, automate the workflow, and extract geospatial information for mapping. Many organizations want to be able to submit, manage, distribute and collaborate over digital assets and maps in real-time using a Web-based system. This requires that the application be secure, pliable, and robust. National Geographic has developed Meta Lens as a service oriented architecture using standard protocols such as XML, and a powerful REST API for extension and customization. This presentation shows how National Geographic employs Meta Lens to unite media, metadata, and maps in a geospatially intelligent system for supporting real-time collaboration over global intel. This solution enables the inclusion of subject matter expertise, whenever and wherever it's needed to support informed and timely decision-making. Attendees of the presentation will learn how to view and share any digital asset in real-time, and georeference that asset to any location in a secure, Web environment that can be accessed anywhere in the world.

Carl Reed

There is a new generation of standards for geospatial/location payloads and service interfaces. These standards support location payloads as an integral part of the Internet infrastructure. They also enable content to be obtained from disparate real time sensor systems using standard interfaces and encodings and enable integration of sensor networks into enterprise and Web applications. Used correctly, these standards will allow a whole new set of applications to emerge, will enable the next steps in the evolution of the geoweb, and will speed technology convergence in the LI space. This presentation will describe these new standards, such as location enabled DHCP, the Sensor Observation Service Interface, and location enabled SIP and how these standards can be used to enhance or create new applications. The presentation will also describe how these new standards are being used as a critical component of the Next Generation 9-1-1 Architecture. The presentation will conclude with some real world examples of the use of these standards, such as real time oceans observing systems. I can guarantee that the audience will have a much better understanding about what standards can be used to create enhanced LI applications.

Fred Anochie and Chris Steele

The speakers will discuss how to set up a major geospatial infrastructure program for success using the multi-million $ nationwide Geospatial Network Infrastructure System (GNIS) program at COX Communications as a case study. The speakers will address key topics including the development of the overall strategy and ROI benefits case, effective stakeholder engagement and involvement, collaborating effectively with internal suppliers, vendor management, system integration, deployment and data capture, in each case sharing learnings from the GNIS experience. Though the program took place within a broadband cable context, the topics covered and learning points identified will be relevant to any large geospatial infrastructure program especially those involving a substantial networked asset base.

The 7 key success factors we will explore with the audience in our view constitute the difference between success and failure with the implementation of a major spatial program of this sort.

Ted DeSaussure

Louisiana’s Department of Social Services (DSS) provides family support, Rehabilitation and community service programs on a daily basis for the citizens of the state. Following the Hurricane Katrina disaster, DSS’ need for data and information expanded dramatically due to the displacement of people in the impact areas, a nearly 10-fold increase in daily disaster-related transactions, and the urgent need of cooperating agencies like FEMA, USDA and other state offices for critical location information. A Business Intelligence (BI) and GIS system was currently in place in Louisiana as a way to manage the state’s billion dollar food stamp program. This system would need an upgrade in order to help in the delivery of food for the needy in the aftermath of one of the largest national disasters in United States history. In the past, the department implemented BI and GIS capabilities from Information Builders and ESRI in order to combat fraud in the food stamp program. Due to the versatility of these applications, DSS was able to approach the challenges set forth by Hurricane Katrina using the same data that support the food stamp fraud detection program.

With BI technologies, the Department of Social Services can input data from its mainframe databases, transform it into valuable business information, and interpret complex relationships that might otherwise be difficult to detect. The department deployed Information Builders WebFOCUS as its primary reporting tool, setting up an architecture for both real-time and staged reporting. Electronic benefit transfer (EBT) transaction data loads into a data warehouse that allows employees to easily access and mine information about transaction amounts, times and locations. GIS helped managers in the department see millions of processed transactions displayed and summarized on maps in seconds. They then were able to drill down into the data, use interactive graphs and generate reports with ease. The GIS software allowed workers to produce accurate and complete maps of service delivery transactions across the entire state. Map visualization helped workers quickly peruse anomalies in the data so they could make informed decisions. The Louisiana TINA-GIS BI system built by a Louisiana DSS project team (included commercial software and consulting services from Blue Streak Technologies, IBM, Information Builders Inc, ESRI, Northrop Grumman Technical Services and Tele Atlas) is considered a model for Disaster Management and Recovery nationwide. DSS is planning to expand TINA-GIS to all DSS programs including Child Care, Child Protection, Foster Care, Food Stamps, Disaster Food Stamps, No Wrong Door, FEMA Temporary Housing, and DSS Disaster Shelters. Since Hurricane Katrina, USDA has mandated the expansion of TINA-GIS to provide DR-EBT information to help state and federal officials track displaced people, locate urgent areas of need due to service interruptions and store closings, and target the location of development for government assistance in upcoming years. The TINA-GIS expansion will help Louisiana deliver many other services more efficiently and be better prepared for emergencies in the future.

Jean-Louis Casabonne, Albert Flores and Beth Cackowski

Making a trip to the library, in some cases, doesn’t involve walking into your local library at all. Studies show that in some states, only 20 percent of residents have library cards. Yet, the demand for subscription-based premium on-line content is on the rise. State libraries recognize this consumer shift, and some are making a concerted effort to make it easier for patrons to access content, rather than relying on the infamous Dewey Decimal System. But, with modest tax-generated funds supporting state-run libraries, and subscription-based services increasingly costly, it was difficult for libraries to provide access to resources and validate in-state residents logging in remotely.

Enter IP geolocation – a simple way to verify that users are within state lines by validating their IP address. The results were instantaneous. In a typical month, Auto-Graphics processed more than 185,000 visitors who were generating more than 2 million database searches. Auto-Graphics was able to flag 1,800 visitors and deny access based on their location and inability to verify themselves as tax-paying state residents. Representatives from Quova and Auto-graphics will be present to talk about the benefits of IP geolocation and how it was implemented in the case of the New Jersey library system successfully

Peter Robinson-Gray

Genworth was interested in reducing the number of manual property appraisals in the automated real-time environment in an effort to reduce turn around time and reduce appraisal costs. Faced with an abundance of information but a lack of accurate property address data that could be relied on to drive business processes, Genworth needed a new way to leverage existing data sources. Subjectivity in the real estate appraisal and mortgage origination process and conflicting data sources also made Genworth look for a more advanced solution. The solution required customized business rules that met Genworth's needs and the flexibility to adjust those rules to accommodate rapid market changes. DMTI Spatial's Location Hub resolved the over-abundance of data and output definitive, address level data that keeps risk levels to a minimum. Location Hub provides technology and data building blocks that deliver the intelligence needed to solve urgent and pervasive business challenges. The end result produced better access to AVM property values to significantly speed up Genworth's auto-adjudication capabilities. The integration of new technology within core, legacy systems presented a challenge to implementation. Manual assessment that took place on-site needed to be replaced by extremely accurate modeling. Also, the dynamic insurance market demands a very flexible system to replace traditional best practices that may no longer be suitable. For the solution to be effective, Location Hub has to find new ways to leverage old data. The solution has increased the level of automated adjudication from 52% to 70%, meaning that approximately 20% more property valuation requests can be processed almost instantly. The expectation is that this number will increase to 75% within one year of implementation.

I am going to take the participants through the GIS functionality that we have implemented and draw a connection to how this implementation has contributed to a clear ROI.

Mark Smith

Location intelligence (LI) will be one of the key enabling technologies for business innovation. LI applies information using software that utilizes location or geography to inform actions or responses to opportunities. This presentation will provide insights on the maturity of Location Intelligence and help understand the industry from fact based research. The presentation will bring forward an exclusive look at the just completed 2008 benchmark research on Location Intelligence by Ventana Research through partnership with Directions Media.

The presentation will discuss the following:

1. What areas of business are benefiting most from location intelligence
2. What complexities exist in the technology and sources of data for LI
3. What barriers to adoption are impacting business from utilizing location intelligence
4. What role are Google and consumer mapping viewers playing in business today
5. Understand best practices and steps to improve your location intelligence maturity

Darren Koenig

Consumer navigation subscriptions contribute a big chunk of carrier data revenue. Will that trend continue in light of the success of free to consumer applications like Google Maps for Mobile and BlackBerry Maps? Darren Koenig shares insights on Navigation monetization trends such as the bundling of Navigation into data plans and the potential for ad supported service. He will also touch on the soon-to-be ubiquity of location based services beyond navigation.