Geo-spatial data offers huge potential for businesses

LAS VEGAS: Geo-spatial data will grow dramatically in the next few years as services like FourSquare become increasingly popular, offering businesses new insights into customer behaviour, according to IBM.

Don Campbell, IBM's chief technology officer for business analytics, explained at the firm's Information onDemand conference that IBM is developing new technologies to meet this growth.

"We are working in our research labs and with close partners in the geo-spatial industry to find new ways to take advantage of this burgeoning area, " he said.

"We already have some products that work with geo-spatial data, such as turning it into visual displays, while we've added capabilities to Cognos 10 that will provide relevant information on a mobile device based on your location."

Jeff Jonas, chief scientist at IBM's entity analytics team, agreed that geo-spatial data could bring benefits to many types of industries and technologies.

"Geo-spatial data is a big thing now, and in the next one to three years we will see a huge growth of this type of data which will have an impact in all sorts of areas," he said.

"It could have big benefits for banking fraud, for example, and could even change the nature of search results by better understanding your movements and your location to offer more relevant results."

Jonas also touched on IBM's Watson project to create a computer that can process and understand natural language, which could have real-world potential for business analytics.

"Watson is the biggest news I've seen this year, and it could definitely bundle in to some of the projects I am working on at the moment," he said.