Last night I was awakened at 3 a.m. by the tornado sirens as storms were progressing through Madison County, Alabama. We were lucky as the storms passed both north and south of our region. Others were not so lucky and we are hearing about the death and destruction in news reports today.

As we assess how to better alert citizens to the path of violent storms, I want to make our readers aware government programs in the works.

The first is the WARN Act, legislation signed by President Bush in October 2006. WARN is an acronym for Warning, Alerts and Response Network that is supposed to provide the support for the Homeland Security Department to use any and all means to communicate with citizens to receive a "life-saving" alert. I have not heard much about the implementation of this legislation and at the time I was told by a Senate subcommittee press relations member that the law had "no teeth."

The second is a FEMA pilot program called the Geo-targeted alert system, which is part of the Integrated Public Alert System or IPAWS. A document describes both systems. According to this document, "The Geo-Targeted Alerting System is a pilot program to integrate near-real-time weather and hazard predictions and provide geo-targeted alerting to homes, buildings, and neighborhoods via cell phones, landline phones, pagers, desktop computers, sirens, and other geo-aware devices."

We need these programs and I would urge those in harms way to send a message to their congressman or congresswoman to continue support of these efforts. Thanks to some forward-thinking government folks in our state, Virtual Alabama was created to support first responders who need information about storm-affected areas.

Lastly, you'll note that areas that were destroyed by tornadoes are nearly unrecognizable. It's times like these when a personal navigation device is an indispensible tool for first responders and homeowners of areas affected by such devastation.

I loved table-sized monitor where TV news anchors pointed and illustrated location-based phenomenon during Tuesday night's "Super Tuesday" primary election coverage. But for my taste they didn't go far enough. They certainly drilled down to the county level to show polling results but never explained why, other than to say that one candidate did better in the urban areas of big cities, etc. Good reporting but not enough.

For example, while Mike Huckabee was winning southern states, the reason was ostensibly that he carried the evangelical vote. But you can't just explain it away with a wave of the arms. Show me that the majority of polling places were held at Baptist Churches, if that was the case or that the demographic composition of the populace was of a certain religious denomination. I want detail; I want facts. And that information is available. I expect this level of coverage will come eventually. For the average viewer some might think that too much information. However, I'd like to see the media apply psychographics to their analysis as well. I want to see if the "American Diversity" demographic went for McCain and the "Affluent Suburbia" went for Romney; did "Struggling Societies" go for Clinton, and "Urban Essence" go for Obama? (See the Mosaic psychographic profiles for explanation of these classifications) I haven't seen it yet, but it will come.

In a recent Gartner report, Microsoft ranks as the top business intelligence (BI) vendor outpacing COGNOS, Business Objects and Microstrategy, according to an article in InformationWeek. The report cites Microsoft's bundling of products and price as the main attractiveness of the company's BI offering in addition to its software quality.

As a review, note that several acquisitions in the BI space have occurred recently. Within the last year, Oracle bought Hyperion; SAP bought Business Objects, and IBM bought COGNOS; and in 2006 Microsoft bought ProClarity. The InformationWeek article suggests that BI is being commoditized or entering the mainstream, which ever way your want to characterize it.

Now, to the point about location intelligence. Oracle is already introducing Oracle location-based solutions into its BI products and not just resting on the fact that it is in a dominant position in supporting GIS application. Yesterday, I got a demo from SAP about how they are integrating mapping tools with CRM as part of their Sagres project. In the past, the BI vendors have acknowledged location is important to visualizing business data relationships but never indulged the applications except with arms-length agreements with MapInfo or ESRI.

Now things are changing. As BI players are acquired by larger IT companies and location technology remains in the forefront of the big players, (I cite the release of spatial datatype support by Microsoft in SQL Server 2008 and SAP's continued development of Sagres as an example of this), location technology too will finally reach BI applications in a much more visible way. What will be interesting to see is how these companies demo their BI solutions. If they put spatial analysis as their leading show-stopper for customers, the days of GIS as a technology relegated to the guy making maps in the backroom are over.