The IT Competence Field Spatial Business Intelligence (SBI) is a novel area that has emerged at the interface between GISystems (GIS) and Business Intelligence (BI) technologies. SBI allows integrating different systems and technologies, saving valuable resources, visualizing organization’s assets, streamlining work flow processes, minimizing risk and enhancing business decision-making. Only recently it has been realized that integrating the geospatial component of business operations through GIS technology provides business intelligence solutions that lead to better business decisions.

This course introduces location analytic tools and techniques applied to selected real-world problems. Main topics covered are:

• spatial data integration: from enterprise databases and data warehouses to spatial data warehouses
• spatially enabling enterprise data, integrating external geospatial market data, spatial data maintenance
• mapping database contents: ArcGIS Server/Geoserver (APIs, REST interfaces, RIA toolkits, WMS and WFS)
  
• thematic mapping and spatial analysis, BigData visualization techniques
• case studies

Software used: ESRI ArcGIS Desktop and ArcGIS Server, MSQL Server 2008R2 (commercial); ProstgesSQL with PostGIS, GeoServer (open source)
Geodata used: geocoded customer and business data, postcode and administrative geographies with geodemographic attributes, consumer- and lifestyle-data, navigable street networks and background maps

By the end of this course students understand the fundamentals of location analytics tools and applications. They will be able to

• extend and spatially enable an enterprise data warehouse ,
  
• maintain a spatial data warehouse according to well-established standards,
• use selected commercial and open source software for geospatial data visualization and analysis,
  
• build small HTML-based case study applications, prepare documentation and present their solutions.
  

This course will enable students to learn the technological underpinnings of location analytics tools. Students will be introduced to practical guidelines and principles for designing SBI solutions with the user's needs as the primary focus. About  30% of teaching time will be used for software demos, 20% for imparting of application scenarios, 40% for instructor led software training and solutions development, 10% for presentation of students' case study results.

Basic understanding of

• programming languages: HTML, Javascript, SQL, PHP (or the like)
• geospatial data modeling, OGC standards, ArcGIS Desktop software (taught in SBI-1 course, please register in the same semester!)