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Location Analytics

Location analytics, or geo-analytics, involves mapping and analyzing the location of people and resources, benefiting various sectors. It utilizes data from sources like GPS, postal addresses, and social media to provide insights for business and social applications. However, the use of location data raises significant privacy concerns regarding tracking, storage, and user control over their information.

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25 views5 pages

Location Analytics

Location analytics, or geo-analytics, involves mapping and analyzing the location of people and resources, benefiting various sectors. It utilizes data from sources like GPS, postal addresses, and social media to provide insights for business and social applications. However, the use of location data raises significant privacy concerns regarding tracking, storage, and user control over their information.

Uploaded by

anirudhacharya134
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We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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CHAPTER 8

LOCATION ANALYTICS

L OCATION ANALYTICS, also known as spatial analysis or geo-analytics is


concerned with mapping, visualizing, and mining the location of people, data,
and other resources. All sectors, including business, government, nonprofit, and
academia, can benefit from location analytics. The case study “Owl Bus”
included in this chapter demonstrates how location analytics and social media
helped Seoul Metropolitan Government in expanding their bus routes and
selecting the “Owl Bus” brand name. Thanks to the GPS (global positioning
systems) embedded in mobile devices, providing location-based services,
products, and information is becoming a reality. In a recent study, scientists used
six million geo-located Twitter messages to observe the “heartbeat” of New
York City (França, Sayama et al. 2015). Using the dataset, the scientist were
able to study and map the waking, sleeping, commuting, work, and leisure
dynamics of the people living in the city during the weekday and weekends.
Such geo-analytics can be instrumental in better understanding our cities and
human behaviors in space and time.

SOURCES OF LOCATION DATA


Location information can come from a variety of sources, including the
following.

POSTAL ADDRESS
Most business analytics applications rely on address information of their
customers, including city names, locality names, and postal or zip codes.

LATITUDE AND LONGITUDE


In geography, latitude (shown as a horizontal line on a globe) and longitude
(shown as a vertical line on a globe) are used to find exact location on Earth.

GPS-BASED
GPS is a satellite-based navigation system that can be used find exact location
people and resources. Mobile analytics mostly rely on GPS-based location data.
GPS-based location analytics can provide us the most accurate location for
social media users.

IP-BASED
Public IP (Internet protocol) can be used to determine the location of Internet
users. A public IP address is an exclusive numerical address (like a home
address) assigned to a device connected to the Internet. Different regions in the
world are assigned a specific block of public IP addresses; hence, it can be used
to mine approximate geo-location of Internet users.

CATEGORIES OF LOCATION ANALYTICS


Based on its scope, location analytics can be broadly classified into two
categories: 1) business data-driven location analytics, 2) social media data-
driven location analytics.

BUSINESS DATA-DRIVEN LOCATION ANALYTICS


Business data-driven location analytics deals with mapping, visualizing, and
mining location data to reveal patterns, trends, and relationships hidden in
tabular business data. Capitalizing on the data stored in a business database,
location analytics, for example, can map and capture vast among of geo-specific
data to provide information, products, and services based on where customers
are. Using the location of customers, for instance, it is possible to recommend
the nearest convenience store, coffee shop, taxi, or even probable social
relations. Or it can be used for any other business decision, such as, what is the
best potential new site for a business warehouse?

Applications of Business Data-Driven Location Analytics


Business data-driven location analytics has several applications, including the
following.

Powerful Intelligence
Simple maps have been widely used, but they are limited in providing insightful
details. Using sophisticated mapping techniques, such as clustering, heat
mapping, data aggregation (e.g., aggregating data to regions), and color-coded
mapping, can generate powerful business intelligence (Hecht 2013).

Geo-Enrichment
Simple data maps can be enriched with customer data, including demographic,
consumer spending, lifestyle, and locations (Hecht 2013). For example, where
do my loyal customers spend most of their time?

Collaboration and Sharing


Maps are easy to understand and are good communication and collaboration
tools. Location analytics can map business data for collaboration across
organization. It can also be used for information sharing purposes with
customers. At end of this chapter, a step-by-step tutorial is provided to map
sample tabular business data using Google Fusion Tables. With Google Fusion
Tables, you can map data and display and share the results as maps, tables, and
charts.

SOCIAL MEDIA DATA-DRIVEN LOCATION ANALYTICS


Social media data-driven analytics relies on social media location data to mine
and map location of social media users, content, and data. Social media location
information comes mainly from GPS and IP.
Uses of Social Media-Based Location Analytics
Social media location–based services are becoming a day-to-day reality.
Organizations use location-based services for a variety of purposes, including
the following.

Recommendation Purposes
Organizations can harvest location data to recommend products, services, and
social events to potential customers in real time as they approach certain
localities. For example, Tender recommends potential social relationships based
on the location of users.

Customer Segmentation
Social media location data can be used to segment customers based on their
geographic location. Tweepsmap (https://tweepsmap.com/), for example, can be
used to geo-locate your Twitter followers by country, state, or city.

Advertisement
Location-based advertisement allows targeted marketing and promotion
campaign mostly delivered through mobile devices to reach specific target
audiences.

Information Request
Based on their current location, customers can request a product, service, or
resource (e.g., the nearest coffee shop, restaurant, or parking lot).

Alerts
Location data can be used to send and receive alerts and notifications, such as
sales and promotion alerts traffic congestion alerts, speed limit warnings, and
storm warnings.
Search and Rescue
Location data is vital in search and rescue operations. For example, Agos a geo-
tagging and reporting platform that enables communities deal with climate
change adaptation and disaster risk reduction.

Navigation
Mobile-and GPS-based navigation services and apps assist us in finding
addresses. BE-ON-ROAD, for instance, is a free offline turn-by-turn GPS
navigation app for Android devices.

LOCATION ANALYTICS AND PRIVACY CONCERNS


While location-based services bring ease, convenience, and safety to customers
and value to business, they also raise serious privacy issues related to collection,
retention, use, and disclosure of location information (Minch 2004). Tracking,
mining, and storing location information can endanger some fundamental human
rights, such as freedom of movement and freedom from being observed. Minch
(2004) raised several issues arising from location-based services, including the
following.

Should users of location-enabled devices be informed when location


tracking is in use?
Should users of location-enabled devices be permitted to control the storage
of location information?
Should location information as stored be personally identifiable, or should
the user have the option to preserve degrees of anonymity?
What legal protection should a person’s historical location information have
against unreasonable search and seizure?
To what extent should users of location-based services be allowed to
choose their own level of identifiability/anonymity?
What level of disclosure control should be dictated by government
regulation? By the affected individual customers, users, etc.? By other
parties?
What governmental legislation and regulation is appropriate to assure
citizens’ rights of privacy in an era of location-aware mobile devices?

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