Thursday, September 4. 2008

What to call apps with maps?

IT Business Canada profiles four mashups that it calls "Business Intelligence 2.0." It's another step in the "what do we call things with maps" question. In this case two of the mashups are geospatial: one is SpatialKey's implementation for Ogden Utah's police force. It's a dashboard, which makes me think BI, but really, it's what we used to call GIS. The second geo example cites the Massachusetts Housing Finance Agency. This mashup integrates MapInfo software and Cognos BI. The big deal: "Before, only 12 superusers had access to geographical tools. Now, all 300 of the agency's workers can access and manipulate BI data in geographical form, says Carl Richardson, BI project manager." That's what we used to call enterprise GIS, no?

While some want hard and fast definitions for our industry (geoweb anyone? what about Web GIS?), the trend is not going their way. Instead, outsiders, like analysts, journalists and marketers are trying to own terms. To complicate matters, the different players are not using the same terms. While this article calls Spatial Key BI, when I spoke with the SpatialKey folks (the company is called Universal Mind) the term Business Intelligence didn't come up. It didn't come up in discussions with the Ogden Police Chief either. The app is on the cover of Computerworld; it's a good thing someone blogged that as I can't recall the last time I saw the cover of a tech publication! The cover article (the same one noted here) is titled: Can Web 2.0 Save BI?

Oh, and a new term I learned about in the article: a bashup is a BI mashup.

Posted by Adena Schutzberg at 06:35 | Comment (1) | Trackbacks (0) |

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How should one refer to an app with a map? Simple, really. A *mapp*.

#1 Dorian Roffe-Hammond on 2008-09-06 17:33 (Reply)

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