Location analytics is much discussed in GIS circles. We felt taking the gobbledegook out of location analytics was long overdue. Many organizations new to GIS are still grasping at the basic GIS concepts, throw the language of location analytics into the mix and you end up with ??????

What is business analytics?

Put simply:

Analytic systems turn an organization’s data into actionable information by discovering and illustrating patterns, trends, and relationships in business data

The typical output from current business analytic systems is in the form of statistical reports. These usually summarize data in tabular form, often including graphs and charts. Analytics are often implemented as independent business intelligence (BI) systems but can also be part of larger enterprise systems, like customer relationship (CRM), enterprise resource (ERP), and resource management systems (RMS).

But traditional business analytics systems do a poor job of answering the where question:

Where are our assets, where are our customers, where are our sales?

Where is at the heart of GIS. Visualizing data through maps, and spatial analysis.

Spatial analysis …. we are in danger of straying into gobbledegook territory. Keep reading!

Czech company UPVISION (the largest unmanned aerial system company in the Czech Republic) in collaboration with The Road and Motorway Directorate of the Czech Republic (RSD), conducted in September 2014, thermal mapping and damage control decks on the highway D3, namely the closed sections of the bridges Koberný, Čekanice and 10 km section of higway.

Hexacopter with thermal camera, Jakub Karas on the left (UPVISION)