Geospatial Analytics: A Useful Tool for Spatial Thinking

Geospatial analytics can be a valuable source of innovation, assisting with issues relating to personnel, operations, marketing, risk, and other areas.

FREMONT, CA: Millions of people worldwide have been exposed to how technology may promote ‘spatial thinking’ owing to location-aware devices and services. Many people use spatial-aware technology daily, whether it is for searching on Google, navigating to an address on their cellphones, ordering a shared transport, or tracking a food delivery.

Organizations are also analyzing location data for a variety of crucial insights, which has far-reaching ramifications. Geospatial analytics can be a valuable source of innovation, assisting with issues relating to personnel, operations, marketing, risk, and other areas. It may also play a role in organizational transformation, transforming how business and operations are handled daily, although ethical boundaries must be respected to realize this technology's potential fully.

Geospatial analytics, or the practice of analyzing data with a spatial dimension, usually entails several steps:

• Gathering geospatial data from a variety of sources, such as surveys and sensors.
• Transforming data into multiple layers of spatial representations.
• Analyzing it to find useful patterns to inform operational or strategic decisions.

Each step may necessitate specialized skills and assets, like remote sensing and image processing tools for data collection and classification, specialized geospatial analysis skills (including cartography) for analyzing spatial data in context and making decisions, and specific programming languages for generating insights.

Geographic Information Systems (GIS)—specialized software systems designed for storing, managing, analyzing, and visualizing geospatial data—are commonly used by early adopters. In 2027, the global GIS market is predicted to grow to 13.6 billion dollars, up from 6.4 billion dollars in 2020.

Many businesses have not tried geospatial analytics yet, but it is becoming increasingly popular. Government agencies used to be the primary providers of geospatial data because they could afford the high expenses of gathering it (from sources like aerial and satellite photography or manually collected survey data) and the highly specialized personnel needed to extract insights from it. However, by next year, 36 percent of large and mid-sized businesses are predicted to have implemented location intelligence software, up from ten percent in 2019. Moreover, private-sector efforts to obtain geographic data are multiplying.

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