I have longed believed in the power of location since the early 90’s when I developed geographic interfaces that introduced mapping and information into analytic applications for sales, marketing and business professionals. Back in those days, which seems like a lifetime ago, the technology and means to build these application capabilities was not easily done. I spent months to build specific technology expertise and competencies and specific processes for geographically tagging business information to be easily represented into a map. Of course that was not all, as I had to build the mapping interface and interactive functionality to make it useful for business users from analysts to management. Boy, I am glad those days are in the past.

Well times have changed as the traditional focus in location intelligence disciplines and technology are transforming again. The opportunity to use the Internet as a reference encyclopedia of geographic-related information is now becoming a reality. The advent of web services and technology to easily tag and search information and present it on a map is much easier today than ever before. Yahoo, Google and others have set building blocks for indexing and searching volumes of content but now what about the location value of the content?

While many in business look at the Internet as a vast cloud of information and services, the opportunity to use it for your business advantage is much larger than you think. In fact our Location Technology benchmark research has found the largest concern in manufacturing and services industries is addressing the consumer demand and adoption which was found in 25 percent of organizations followed closely by business demand at 22 percent. The growing volumes of content across the Internet are part of the untapped opportunity for business to provide methods to improving the efficiency of activities and to provide consumers the means to find information about products and services. This is commonly referred to as GeoWeb or geospatial web that intersects the content on the Internet to useful consumer and business related information services.

No matter if you are trying to identify information about new locations and need to examine geographic related issues in your supply chain or understand potential governmental, competitive, weather or any related content to places of interest the Internet can bring value. The importance of analyzing location and patterns across location and non-location data was the second most very important priority for business as found in 42 percent of organizations in the Ventana Research Location Intelligence benchmark research. A company called MetaCarta has brought forward a platform and service to help you. MetaCarta unifies business and consumer driven requirements for bringing geographic context by aligning content to geographic search and navigation needs with content across the Internet and enterprise.

I recently have had a chance to review the strategy and technology including their new MetaCarta platform as they have been pioneering new technologies in Location Intelligence since 2001 and focusing on harnessing value from content on the Internet. Not just is MetaCarta streamlining the processing of content across the Internet and your enterprise through geo-tagging technology, they are building indexes to make it easily searchable for displaying on a map like Google Maps or within an application or web-service mash-up.  In addition they are deliver geographic reference data for support the content in languages that may need to be referenced to a location. MetaCarta is also intersecting news feeds that they have powered to be value added content into GeoWeb focused applications. MetaCarta recently brought forward their new geographic search and referencing platform (GSRP) brings news capabilities and integration of geographic services but also available through an on-premise or hosted appliance and software-as-a-service (SaaS) approaches. MetaCarta focused on ensuring the architecture meets specific needs of location-based services across the GeoWeb requires the interoperability, speed, scalability and reliability to operate across the Internet in real time.

To provide deeper context of the GeoWeb and capabilities supported by MetaCarta, I found in our recent research that the importance of integrating unstructured content which is located-related was most important in 69 percent of organizations followed by related customer, photo and competitive content that is usually not easily integrated and geographically referenced. Embedding the use of GeoWeb is not just for desktops and web browsers but to operational workers and mobile technologies as our benchmark research found this as a top priority in 21 percent of organizations. I would encourage your business to examine how to leverage or even monetize the content across the Internet and see what the GeoWeb can do for you!

Let me know your thoughts or come and collaborate with me on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Regards,

Mark Smith
CEO & EVP Research

Ventana Research defines Location Intelligence as the integration, access and use of location through information and technology for helping consumers and businesses to be efficient and effective.