Note: This presentation is for GeoCamp 2009!

Business Intelligence (BI) tools, such as dashboards, reporting and On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP) allow decision-makers to analyze data and information in order to make better decisions. Summarized data from operational systems are presented to users in interactive charts, graphs and reports. As it is commonly recognised that about 80% of data has a spatial component, this can be used to enhance the BI user experience with map displays and spatial analysis tools.

A complete open-source BI software stack is now offered by Pentaho (http://www.pentaho.org). It includes:

* An Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) tool (Kettle) used to integrate data from heterogeneous sources to a data warehouse;
* An OLAP server (Mondrian), which provides multidimensional query facilities on top of the data warehouse;
* Reporting and dashboard tools, used to present data to analysts in a convivial manner.

The integration of Pentaho software suite with open-source GIS components has thus been investigated to create spatially-enabled BI solutions. The GeoSOA research group has thus adapted Kettle to manage the extraction and loading of spatial data and have upgraded Mondrian to query spatial data stored in a PostGIS-based data warehouse, in order to support enhanced map-enabled web based dashboards and geo-analytical Web Services. This work has led to the implementation of GeoKettle and GeoMondrian. A video illustrating the functionalities of GeoKettle and the use of GeoMondrian with a Google Maps Mashup can be downloaded at http://geosoa.scg.ulaval.ca. GeoKettle is available for download at http://www.geokettle.org and GeoMondrian (http://www.geo-mondrian.org) will be released in the next few weeks.

The presentations performed by the GeoSOA research group at the FOSS4G 2007 and the GeoCamp 2008 conferences have detailed this integration and have illustrated how it is possible to build Geospatial Business Intelligence solutions based on free and open-source software and geospatial standards.

To complete this ongoing work, a project has been funded last summer by the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) program under the umbrella of OSGeo. The project has dealt with the implementation of an open source cartographic component which enables navigation in geospatial (Spatial OLAP or SOLAP) data cubes. This cartographic component aims to be integrated to existing dashboard frameworks in order to produce interactive geo-analytical dashboards.

A first prototype of such a tool based on the dashboard component of the Pentaho suite has been implemented before the GSoc project in the GeoSOA research group. A video which illustrates this prototype and shows GeoMondrian in action is available at http://geosoa.scg.ulaval.ca. We have thus coupled the Pentaho dashboard tool with GeoMondrian and we have extended the cartographic part (based on the Google Maps API) in order to allow navigation through the spatial dimension and to provide a dashboard prototype where the integration of maps (i.e. of the spatial component) makes its whole sense (drill down, roll up, synchronisation between all graphical components, access to measures on graphical components or map, etc.).

The demo is rather simple (technological challenges were important enough) but demonstrates the great potential of this kind of software in order to support the decision process especially for persons who are non expert in geomatics or computer sciences (decision makers, managers, etc.). It illustrates in a visual manner how GeoMondrian works even if it is still under development!

To overcome difficulties we have faced during this first work and to provide richer geospatial functionalities and extension capabilities (and also in order to provide users with a complete open source software stack for geospatial Business Intelligence), the GSoC project led last summer has investigated the use of OpenLayers, an advanced and well known open source cartographic component together with an AJAX based open source framework in order to allow the connection with a Spatial OLAP server such as GeoMondrian, the navigation in the geospatial data cubes and the cartographic representation of some measures. An enhanced version of the code produced during the GSoC project will be released as a new open source project (named Spatialytics, http://www.spatialytics.org) together with GeoMondrian in the next few weeks.

The presentation will thus detail the results of this project and will demonstrate how the open source geospatial Business Intelligence stack developed by the GeoSOA research group works and how it supports better decision making.