GeoBusiness is the result of integrating corporate data and maps. It provides a very exciting way to view and analyze business information, as well as creating dramatic new pictures of your business. GeoBusiness can allow you to easily spot trends, patterns, and opportunities that would be difficult or impossible with more traditional techniques. GeoBusiness can let you perform "what-if" analyses before committing to valuable company resources. It can allow you to view sales information geographically at a glance. Insurance companies can compute and display probable maximal losses that would result from a catastrophic disaster in an earthquake-prone zone. And these are but a few of the possibilities.
You might be wondering how all of this is possible. The answer is that a large percentage of business information has at least some content that is geographic in nature. Some examples of geographic, or spatial, data include:
- Postal ZIP Codes
- Telephone Number (Area Code, in particular)
- Street Address
- City
- State
- Latitude and Longitude, as provided in Global Positioning Systems (GPS)
By using the desktop business mapping software MapPoint, you can quickly prepare a column-chart map that compares the sales for each year by state, as shown in the following figure.
MapPoint made use of the column with the heading State to determine where each of the side-by-side bar charts needed to be placed geographically. Also, MapPoint was told to sum the sales for each state.
Alternatively, suppose that you desire a map that shows the distribution of your customers by county. Here MapPoint uses the ZIP Code column in the table to determine which county each of the customers is from. The resulting map, shown below, uses shaded circles to show how many customers you have for each of the counties represented in your customer database.
