Using a previous definition from this blog that location intelligence  is the extraction of actionable decisions from data using business intelligence mechanisms strengthened by location analysis methods it would seem reasonable to ponder the “levers and knobs” a user manipulates to seek out nuggets of paydirt.

One way of thinking about this is to consider a location intelligence console. There are countless business intelligence consoles and dashboards and some well advanced efforts to inject location based capabilities to some of those consoles. MapInfo’s location intelligence is a component that successfully brings location intelligence to BI consoles.

I think there is a case to be made that pervasive location based analytics also have a place in the business arsenal of the modern company. In a console built with unrestricted location intelligence capabilities, it would be possible to ask intrinsically spatial questions and have the spatial aspects considered as a fundamental part of the analysis.

MapInfo’s Research department has built up such a framework on the web and exposed it for comment. The site is called Envention and the url is http://www.envention.biz You are cordially invited to explore the site and let us know your comments.

Attached here is an extract from the text about the site and below is a screen shot of a terrorism insurance risk assessment under way in the console.

Welcome to Envention

A MapInfo User Learning Experiment

We’re sharing this site hoping that motivated, smart individuals (like you of course) will comment on the things you like and don’t like.

Being a mule (a site that carries mock ups and experiments as a payload), the site could change at any moment and might just go wandering off-line (as mules do).

Envention.biz is an extensive prototype. It might fall over. We hope it won’t but if it does we’d be very grateful if you’d let us know what happened. So we can blame somebody.

You don’t need to install anything to run this. We’d love it if you rushed out and bought gobs of MapInfo software and data and models once you see how good it is, but you don’t need anything from us to run it. Just remember that some of us have kids to feed…

Supporting this site from behind the scenes are full production versions of MapInfo® products including Envinsa® (you can read about it here), SpatialWare® (here), the TargetPro® server (here), Predictive Analytics models (here) and MapInfo Data (here). These won’t fall over….