Objectives

GeoBI initiative is a joint effort of companies, organizations, projects’ communities and individuals set up to:

• improve the coordination work in the Location Intelligence area
• disseminate BI knowledge in the GIS world and vice-versa
• promote the integration between BI and Geographical Systems
• strengthen connections among members and support new business opportunities
• create a research network focused on Location Intelligence
• turn research results into innovative enterprise-level applications.

Principles

Key principles of the GeoBI initiative are:

• value proposition: we want to create new value through GIS and BI integration
• separation of concerns: we focus on the integration of GIS and BI software stacks, keeping them as decoupled as possible; reinventing GIS functionalities into existing BI suites or vice-versa is no-sense
• constant growth: we believe that LI solutions must be able to scale up functionalities and costs incrementally, focusing on the answer to real users’ requirements, avoiding the all-or-nothing option
• low TCO (Total Cost of Ownership): we believe that only by reducing the TCO, the Location Intelligence can become pervasive.

Main Activities

GeoBI initiative will initially focus on the following main activities:

• involving new members and animating the internal discussion
• working with the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) in order to define new standards for Location Intelligence (spatial and business data linkage, geoMDX)
• creating an open knowledge base on Location Intelligence (wiki, whitepapers, guidelines, webinars)
• supporting the integration of a full stack of Location Intelligence solutions and tools, such as Spatial enabled DBMS, GeoETL, SOLAP, thematization engine, and others, realized through the collaborative work of its members
• disseminate the initiative results and promote the activities of the initiative members, through the website and by participating in local and international conferences.
• contributing back all extensions made to projects included in the stack
• encouraging the constitution of a service network supporting the stack.