With SpatialKey’s SaaS platform, insurers can now finally bring together and analyze *on-the-fly* – not in hours or days as with other tools- a variety of data coming from different sources, and make immediate business decisions accordingly.

Take tropical storm Alex, expected to turn into a hurricane (thankfully heading away from the Gulf of Mexico oil spill) this Wednesday as an example. Since some of the predictive hurricane models are proprietary, we decided to use publicly available datasets of the hurricane’s path at http://www.hurricanezone.net/#01l, as well as a mock sample of insurance policy to showcase how easy it was to import and analyze information using SpatialKey.

After downloading a shapefile containing the Tropical Storm ALEX 5-Day Track here, we easily imported it into SpatialKey and created a new report showing the potential 72 and 120 hour paths of the storm.

Tropical Storm ALEX 5-Day Track, Uncertainty Cone

Next we added our fictitious insurance company’s policy data and overlayed it with the predictive hurricane’s path. This allowed us to see in minutes, not days or hours, which policies in which geographies might be affected by Alex. Minutes vs days make a big difference- the quicker the information gets in the hands of decision makers within the insurance company, the quicker they can adjust their plans- for example where to dispatch local agents after a natural disaster.

Tropical Storm ALEX 5-Day Track with Policy files

SpatialKey shines by making complex data analysis simple and available to the people who need it the most.

Tropical Storm ALEX 5-Day Track with Policy files filtered

Within just a few minutes, no programming or analysts required, we imported the insurance policy data from a spreadsheet, shape files from the NOAA site and used the capabilities of SpatialKey to filter which policies could potentially be affected by the path of the storm. We could take this analysis further and forecast the impact of the storm on commercial vs home policies or per construction type. We could even import additional datasets, for example local demographics, for further insight. The analysis capabilities are endless. And the other benefit of SpatialKey is that the information (for example which policies are at the highest risk) can easily then be exported out of SpatialKey and shared within the organization for follow up. Or interactive reports containing the information above can be shared so that others on the team can further slice and dice it according to their analysis needs.

To find out how SpatialKey can help your insurance company, please visit here or contact us.

The great news is that analytical capabilities previously limited to larger companies with deep pockets are now available to a broader range of organizations. Plus, even larger companies are benefiting from new SaaS and cloud-based technologies that allow easier access to data often locked in legacy systems. More and more companies can therefore take a proactive approach to their decision making, an approach based on facts, vs the reactive approaches of the past.

Police report

Take law enforcement. When SpatialKey first launched, we immediately received interest from police departments looking into better approaches to crime fighting. Most already used sophisticated RMS or CompStat data systems, yet those systems did not take into account data from other systems or outside sources. For example gang data might be in one database, crime incidents in RMS, and offender information in a spreadsheet with no easy way to pull the information together to make better policing decisions. What they saw in SpatialKey was a way to get a better ROI on their investments by adding new dimensions to their data analysis capabilities.

With SpatialKey, a commander for example can bring in data from multiple sources and start looking for patterns: there are a string of robberies happening in a neighborhood- how can we curtail these? Who are the parolees or known offenders living within x miles of that area? Is there a specific time of the day that these crimes occur? In the police world, they call this Intelligence-led policing- the ability to leverage intelligence to guide crime fighting decisions. So if the commander sees a pattern in the time when crimes occur, increasing the number of patrol cars in the neighborhood at that time is a fact-based approach that hopefully will generate faster/cheaper results. And all it took was a couple minutes of analysis with SpatialKey vs randomly patrolling the area.

Well data is data is data. What we’ve seen in the past year is that a Sales VPs’ data analysis needs are actually not that different from a police chief’s (or any other decision maker for that matter). At the end of the day, what’s important for organizations is to find ways to pull together information critical to decision making and make it available to the people who need to actually make those decisions. So for one parolees, crime logs, or calls for service are key data points to look into to make fact-based decisions, for the other it might be sales leads, product sales, customer calls or customer demographics. And of course the types of data SpatialKey clients need to analyze is as varied as their industries.

The common thread we’ve found amongst all of our clients is that although they already have data analysis capabilities (most already use some form of BI or GIS system), those systems do not provide them the ad-hoc, “get the answer now” data analysis needs the addition of SpatialKey provides.

So although a Sales VP might be using Salesforce as a great CRM tool, there is no easy way to tie the salesforce data to other internal or external data sources to make better decisions to maximize sales opportunities. By incorporating SpatialKey with Salesforce, he/she can now bring in demographic information or competitive data into the picture. Are there patterns, geographic or otherwise, that can help guide sales staff deployment or lead closing activities? Is there a correlation between deal size and marketing activities? What works best to close leads in this geography vs the other?

In a fast-paced world when we all need an answer yesterday, the benefit they see in SpatialKey is that not only can they leverage knowledge they never had before, but they also don’t need to wait on data analysis gurus to get answers. They can do that analysis themselves- on the fly. Many actually use SpatialKey in meetings so that “what if” questions can be answered immediately. Maybe we should call this Intelligence-led sales…..

Please visit spatialkey.com for more information. We also offer a free trial if you want to take a spin of the app with your own data.

Analyzing conflicts via maps is not new. For centuries generals and politicians have moved pushpins on maps to help guide troop movements, understand enemy positions, or help avert conflict altogether. What’s new to conflict and crisis mapping are the tools now allowing military, politicians, and humanitarian groups better understand what drives political instability and violent conflict, and better address it.

One of the more rewarding uses of SpatialKey has been driven by a team led by Dr Clionadh Raleigh. Dr Raleigh and team members from the PRIO Center for the Study of Civil War created the ACLED (Armed Conflict Location and Event Data) database. The ACLED project team’s objective was to provide a better read of conflicts by understanding the relationships between combatants, social groups, economies, and even natural phenomena such as droughts or floods. Ultimately their goal is to achieve a more stable, just, and peaceful world.

Crisis mapping

Thanks in part to funding from the World Bank, ACLED provides up-to-date, immediately accessible analytics and maps for over 50 countries in the developing world to help academics, the World Bank, NGOs, aid agencies and more gain insights on civil war dynamics. The database includes for example the date and location of conflict events, event types, rebel and other groups involved, as well as specifics on battles, killings, riots, and recruitment activities by rebels, governments, militias, armed groups, protesters and civilians, and much more.

The difficulty of creating a central database for crisis mapping is that it needs to bring together vast amounts of diverse information coming from a wide variety of sources. In technical terms: a data mess. Since neither Dr Raleigh nor the users of the ACLED database are trained GIS (Geographic Information System) professionals, they decided to use SpatialKey to centralize and analyze the data. SpatialKey is web-based and does not require special training or programming. All users need is an internet connection to immediately create highly visual maps and reports.

The benefit of using SpatialKey is that each agency using ACLED data can now create maps to help answer totally different questions, no data specialists required. Some groups need to better understand how to mitigate conflict in a specific area, others want to find the safest zone to place a refugee camp, and yet others want to understand the impact of possible floods and droughts on a conflict so they can arrange their resources accordingly.

This has allowed researchers to analyze data with more precision, as well as create a more collaborative environment to help the researcher community create predictive models of civil war. It has also helped challenge assumptions. For example Dr Raleigh says that many people considered civil wars to be primarily rural events, but SpatialKey has showed that these conflicts tend to happen close to larger cities, as rebel groups attempt to engage with the military. She considers that the combination of ACLED and SpatialKey goes a long way toward advancing the field- it provides the next generation in conflict analysis and crisis mapping.

If you cannot attend Doug’s session, please read our case study on the use of SpatialKey by ACLED.

For more information on SpatialKey, or to start your free trial, please go to spatialkey.com.

The first few rows of the Sacramento dispatch export

It took just a couple of minutes to import one of these files into SpatialKey, where we can produce rich interactive maps and reports related to dispatch activity in Sacramento.  The file from August 2009 contained about 30,600 records with location information.  Dispatches for Disturbance-Noise were the 7th most common type of dispatch in August.

Heatmap of the 1079 Noise Disturbances in Sacramento during August 2009.

By using the Temporal Heat Index and Timeline to inspect the date and time of occurrence, we get a better picture of when Disturbance-Noise calls occurred.  The Temporal Heat Index summarizes the number of crimes by hour of day and day of week.  Notice the dispatch volume is generally highest late at night – especially on Saturday and Sunday.

Most dispatches related to noise happen late at night on weekends.

So where are these early morning disturbances?  Simply select day/hour grids of interest and zoom in to see the detail.  Here’s a look at noise disturbances southeast of Capitol Park between 1 and 3am on weekends in August:

Southeast of Capital Park might be a good place to party but a hard place to sleep on weekends.

Try it for yourself

You can open up the sample report that we created to visualize these dispatches.  The report is fully interactive, so you can really explore the dispatch activity in Sacramento.  We saved the report with a filter for Disturbance-Noise. Try modifying this filter – and adding others – to see how SpatialKey works.  Interested in seeing where and when the 338 Drunk Suspects were encountered?  Or the 27 Shooting into Inhabited Dwellings?  Maybe you want to see where and when the 2246 Subject Stops occurred.  It’s simple with SpatialKey.

• Try Sample Report

Looking for easy-to-use location intelligence from your own data?  Get started with our free trial, and start visualizing your data in minutes without installing any software.

Notes

The images and reports in this post were created with publicly accessible data.  Check out Sacramento’s dispatch page to see their notes about what data is included.  We omitted data without address location in our SpatialKey report.

We have no association with the Sacramento police department (but we’d love to, so contact us if you’re from the Sacramento PD and want to use SpatialKey). SpatialKey does have specific features designed for Law Enforcement.

With the abundance of this raw data new challenges arise. How do cities display the information in meaningful ways without complex and costly software?  This data is typically shared in the format of CSV (comma separated value ), spreadsheet or XML files containing many thousands of rows. Extracting meaning from the data can be a daunting task requiring multiple pivot tables, graphs, and filters along with the expertise in doing so.  And assuming you are able to get this far, you will still be left without an easy solution in which to share this data with others.

How do you expose the location based information within the data?  It is possible take a handful of the items in the spreadsheet and plot them in a web based mapping solution but most web based maps fall short in their ability to plot thousands of points in a meaningful way.

With SpatialKey you can take nearly any of these data feeds and transform them into an interactive report in minutes. You don’t need to be a specialist to create and share time- and location-based analyses.

To demonstrate the power and flexibility of SpatialKey an example from the New York Department of Sanitation containing graffiti locations is shown below.  You can find this data in the NYC Data Mine by searching for the keyword “graffiti”.  This dataset contains requests to clean graffiti (other than bridges or highways) received from the public in the last 12 months. They include location information, open and closed dates, and details about the community.  A small snapshot of this data is shown below

Figure 1.0 - Sample of graffiti data from the NYC dataset

It is important to note that SpatialKey was not developed for this specific data and no programming was required to build the reports. It is as simple as exporting a CSV from excel and importing the data into SpatialKey. SpatialKey inspects the data during the import process and detects the data types (text, numbers and dates) and builds a custom user interface tailored to the data structure from the spreadsheet. SpatialKey also handles the geocoding as long as you have address information or X/Y in the data. The import process can be performed with thousands of rows in just a few minutes.

After importing the data a full screen map report is opened as shown in Figure 2.0. The report contains a timeline that highlights the trends of open graffiti reports over the last twelve months and the map highlights hot spots for reported graffiti locations. You can instantly identify these trends and hotspots quickly in SpatialKey then start to drill down to identify additional trends with the filtering tools.

Figure 2.0 - A map and timeline of reported graffiti

In Figure 2.1 a categorical pod for the “status” field in our data is opened and the data is aggregated by the unique statuses in that field.   By clicking on the “Closed” status you can filter out all closed incidents and the map reflects only open and pending incidents. In addition you can switch the timeline to show unfiltered data to see the trend of open/pending vs closed incidents.  Within the stacked bar chart the open incidents are displayed with the filled area and the closed incidents are shown in the unfilled area.

Figure 2.1 - Displaying the trend of open versus closed reports over time

A custom interface to display and filter data can be built in seconds with no programming or development needed. In Figure 3.0 four categorical pods have been added from different fields available in the graffiti dataset these pods can be used for both display and filtering.

Figure 3.0 - Adding pods for several fields from the graffiti dataset, pods can be used for display and filtering

Here are a few other  examples highlighting the power when you combine city data with SpatialKey.

• Crime in San Francisco’s Urban Renewal Area
• Visualizing SFPD’s “Operation Safe Schools”

Spreadsheets come to life and provide new meaning with just a few simple steps in SpatialKey. Try it out yourself with our 30 day trial.

1. International geocoding requires conversion from vastly differing address formats across many different countries making it difficult to obtain a one size fits all solution.  This requires us to implement specific solutions for different countries or areas of the world.
2. Of the well known and widely available international geocoding solutions most are not free or prevent the commercial use within a third party product.
3. Many international geocoding solutions are quite costly and can cost hundreds or thousands of dollars to geocode just a few thousand addresses.

What can I do now if I have International data that I want to use in SpatialKey?

If your existing data does not have latitude and longitude and is outside of the United States there are several third party solutions that you can use to geocode your data before importing into SpatialKey.  The USC GIS research laboratory provides a comprehensive listing of free and paid Geocoding options. There are very few free services that offer bulk geocoding for international addresses but you can utilize one of the free services listed at USC GIS research laboratory and script your own solution for bulk geocoding. Using a combination of a third party geocoding solution  and our data import API you can automate  management of your data within SpatialKey.

One solution that provides a free bulk geocoding for European data with up to 5000 addresses per day is http://www.batchgeocode.com. BatchGeocode uses the Yahoo API’s and supports both United States and European addresses.

Will SpatialKey provide International geocoding in the future?

We will continue to search for a low cost, easy to use International geocoding solution that can be integrated with SpatialKey.  If you have an immediate need for international geocoding within SpatialKey we can custom develop a solution that integrates with a third party geocoder. Contact our sales team if you are interested in a custom solution.

Here are the basic steps to get started with the DIAPI:

1. Generate an XML file describing the dataset and a CSV containing the actual data. See Creating Data Import XML and CSV files for more details.
2. Use the HTTP services to authenticate and upload these assets. See the Developer Guide and DIAPI Documentation for more details.

To help you get started we have provided samples in both Java and ColdFusion. Additionally we provide an example application that you can download, customize and deploy called the SpatialKey Data Poller.