Thursday, April 24. 2008

Location & Intelligence

On the eve of our 5th Location Intelligence Conference I find myself looking around at who else has picked up using the term "location intelligence" to either describe what their product does or what business they think they are in. At a recent conference someone asked me and others on a panel for a definition. Having registered the URL years ago, I begged off on answering. I'd rather not confine the term to anything I or someone else says it is. It's a little like GIS these days...perhaps more buzz than something tangible. As it is, I count may companies adopting the phrase for just that reason. They don't want to be saddled with explaning the term GIS and propose using the phrase because it is more understandable, which was part of the reason I settled on the term in the first place.

However, it's being spread a little thin. Wavemarket, a mobile LBS provider, has adopted the term as has Pitney Bowes MapInfo, one of the original desktop mappers. geoVue, Oracle, DMTI Spatial, and others have all emphasized the use of the term in their own way. I believe it was DMTI that offered the definition in Wikipedia. Mark Smith, CEO/CTO at Ventana Research offers a definition for his BI clients around which they have an established LI practice. So, from LBS to GIS to BI, the usage of LI has been somewhat stretched.

But to me, that's fine. In cultivating the adoption of 'location intelligence' as a more cogent moniker about which hangs some better understanding of location-based applications, that's exactly how I had hoped the conference would evolve. In it's fifth year, LI has certainly grown to provide a venue where an eclectix mix of ideas and technologies can come together.

Shouldn't this data be freely available?

The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) and the Tampa Bay Estuary Program’s Manatee Awareness Coalition (MAC) want to save manatees. But for years, no mapping company's would put the manatee and homeland security zones in Tampa Bay on the navigation maps. But now Garmin is. The information is on all new chart plotters and updated SD cards.

Kipp Frohlich, leader of the FWC’s Imperiled Species Management Section, said “This marks a breakthrough that can save a lot of manatees. We tried unsuccessfully for years to get any mapping company to put the zones in their map covers. Garmin stepped up to the plate and did it.”

This is a great story and I do appreciate that Garmin stepped up, but if we all really want to save manatees, shouldn't this data be freely available to install on any unit? Perhaps that's naive and it's not how the boating navigation GPSs/charting tools work, but I thought I'd ask.

- TCPalm