TY - JOUR T1 - Enabling Geospatial Business Intelligence JF - Open Source Business Resource Y1 - 2009 A1 - Thierry Badard A1 - Etienne Dubé AB - Recently, interest in the huge potential of Geospatial BI has increased. It aims at combining geographic information system (GIS) and business intelligence (BI) technologies. Geospatial BI combines spatial analysis and map visualization with proven BI tools in order to better support the corporate data analysis process and to help companies make more informed decisions. BI is a business management term which refers to applications and technologies that are used to gather, provide access to, and analyze data and information about company operations. BI applications are usually used to better understand historical, current and future aspects of business operations. BI applications typically offer ways to mine database- and spreadsheet-centric data to produce graphical, table-based and other types of analytics regarding business operations. BI systems give companies a more comprehensive knowledge of the factors affecting their business, such as metrics on sales, production, and internal operations, in order to to make better business decisions. Be aware that BI is a different from classical databases and much more complex. This article provides a rapid introduction to some important BI concepts. It then highlights the need for geospatial BI software and deals with the integration of the spatial component in a BI software stack in order to consistently enable geo-analytical tools. We then present different works performed and tools designed by the GeoSOA research group. PB - Talent First Network CY - Ottawa UR - http://timreview.ca/article/289 IS - September 2009 U1 - University of Laval Dr. Thierry Badard is CTO of Spatialytics, a new company in geospatial BI. He is also a professor of geoinformatics at Laval University (Canada) where he heads the GeoSOA research group. He is a regular researcher of the CRG and of the GEOIDE NCE. He has more than 13 years of experience and has been involved in national and international research and development projects of importance. He acts as a chair, editor and reviewer for several international journals and scientific conferences. Dr. Thierry Badard is also actively involved in the geospatial free and open source community. He is an OSGeo charter member and a member of the OSGeo conference committee. Member of the board of the OSGeo Francophone chapter, he is also a founding co-chair of the OSGeo Quebec local chapter. He is a founding co-chair of the ICA working group on open source geospatial technologies. U2 - University of Laval Etienne Dubé is a research assistant in the GeoSOA Research Group, Laval University. He holds a Masters degree in Geomatic Science and a Bachelor degree in Computer Engineering. He is the main developer in the GeoMondrian, SOLAPLayers and GeoKettle projects. ER -