Location-Awareness for Business Intelligence Apps

If you carry a smartphone, you might take for granted all of the location-based services that you have access to.  Weather forecasts, local headlines, finding stores or restaurants, are just some of the ways you can leverage your location to harness relevant information and data.

Every day, business becomes increasingly mobile, leveraging a wide variety of connected devices, phones, tablets, netbooks, laptops, etc.; BI applications that recognize the location of the user can be a great at providing the most meaningful data, reports, and analysis wherever your users in the field might be.

So, how does it work for LogiXML BI? First, let’s get familiar with the location concepts of Geocoding and Reverse Geocoding.

Geocoding is the process of assigning coordinates (latitude, longitude) to address data such as streets, cities, country, zip-codes, and more.   Reverse geocoding is the opposite, using lat/long coordinates and providing the textual addresses in return.   For BI applications, both capabilities can be very useful both in mapping data and filtering results.  With location-aware BI systems, reverse geocoding can be extremely useful in filtering the data that contains text descriptions of places.  Think of a report featuring data about facilities that are in different cities.  As you travel to each facility, use location awareness to interact with data within that location automatically.

Mobile browsers on Laptops with Wifi enabled, smartphones, and tablets, provide your apps with real-time geographic coordinates.   These lat/long values can then be used by Logi’s reverse geocoding element to provide easily understood, text information about the location of the user.   For example, if your data is city or address specific, use the reverse geocoded value returned as “city” and/or “address” to filter your records to the appropriate level of detail in your dashboards and visualizations.

As you add location-aware elements into your LogiXML apps, you’ll be able to find more productivity from mobile users that need access to their real-time reports and dashboards.   For more details, visit Logi DevNet to learn about how to work with geocoding elements in your projects.

David Abramson is the product manager at LogiXML. Read more articles from David here and here.