I’ve touched on location based services in a few articles on AGPS and Plazes.  All which has me thinking more and more about logical extensions for this — how do we get location “off the map” and into a real application?  I was pointed to GeoRSS which adds geospatial support to RSS posts which allows you to know WHERE a post is relevant to, amongst other things.

This is leading to some interesting applications, if you haven’t seen it, check out World Explorer from Yahoo Research Berkely which analyses Flikr tags to produce a geotagged map of the world, weighted by the number of tags for a location – explore the world through the eyes of others in a way that makes sense.

So what should Enterprise Architects be thinking about?  In my overly lengthy post on AGPS (I’m going to try get better at more succinct ideas I promise!) I suggested you should be thinking about location type services, but I’ll go one further — you need a consistent global taxonomy for location in your organisation as it will become crucial.

Some 16 years ago, I worked for a fertilizer company, and we experimented with MapInfo to map sales data.  What we found was that based on the invoice address, most of our product was shipped into the centre of the city.  Now of course, this was explained as farmers either being owned by corporates, or having accountants who are located in the CBD.  Still, it wasn’t what we expected.  Even moving to delivery address didn’t help, as product was delivered to one of 6 major national distribution centres where farmers sent a truck to pick up product.

The point is simply this, location offers unique opportunities, many which I propose we don’t fully understand at this moment in time and others that will arrive.  To some extent we’ve been doing this in business for a while (hands up who has systems that know what office a staff member is located in), but we probably don’t understand this to the same degree of relevance about customers and in particular our own information.

I’m still remain sceptical that LBS will prove to be a ”killer app” for office based corporates, but I’ve no doubt that it will provide some incremental level of benefit.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 14th, 2007 at 7:52 am and is filed under Innovation, LBS, Mashup, Web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.