The essential guide to location intelligence
Oct 2024
By transforming complex geographical data into meaningful insights and answers, location intelligence is reshaping industries and offering solutions to challenges.
Oct 2024
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How can you create winning project proposals? What areas are the best to invest in for real estate development? Is there new taxable activity in the community? All of these questions — and many more — can be answered using location intelligence.
But what is location intelligence?
High-resolution imagery. 3D modelling. AI predictions. And a suite of geospatial tools you can use to impact change. This is location intelligence, and it solves today’s challenges by turning imagery into insights and insights into answers.
Through the visualisation and analysis of geospatial data, industries like commercial, government, and insurance can leverage invaluable insights to guide important decisions.
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What does location intelligence do?
Location intelligence refers to the process of deriving actionable insights from geospatial data. It involves collecting, analysing, and interpreting data that has a geographical or spatial aspect. For GIS professionals, this means leveraging advanced technologies to understand patterns, relationships, and trends tied to specific locations.
By transforming complex geographical data into meaningful insights, location intelligence is reshaping industries and offering solutions to challenges.
For example, vertical imagery gives users accurate, geo-referenced aerial imagery. This enables professionals to remotely measure length, width, radius, and area. Meanwhile, 3D digital models, where available, can expand your understanding of ground truth with accurate bare-earth and built-environment visuals. And, AI detections automatically reveal geospatial features including roof condition, solar panels, surface types, property risk factors, and more.
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Who uses location intelligence?
Location intelligence is used by numerous industries to improve the way they work. But the biggest users are GIS professionals in government, commercial, insurance, and disaster response. Why? Because these professionals rely on accurate ground truth at a scale that only location intelligence can deliver.
Government
Government departments at all levels rely on location intelligence for a host of applications, like property inspections and assessments, urban change forecasting, and monitoring infrastructure projects. Local and national governments also use location intelligence to improve transparency between stakeholders and the community.
Southfield, MI needed to find a way to effectively manage stormwater utilities. Nearmap location intelligence includes high-resolution imagery — captured up to 3 times a year in that region — geospatial data, and AI feature detections. These solutions enabled the city of Southfield to proactively map impervious surfaces and readily view, identify, and verify stormwater utilities at scale.
Insurance
Location intelligence allows insurers to optimise pricing, quoting, underwriting, renewals, and claims by applying AI and computer vision to high-resolution aerial imagery. The collection of property data provided by location intelligence empowers insurers to reduce costly physical inspections by allocating them to only high-risk properties, make more accurate risk decisions in a fraction of the time, create custom business rules that flag properties for attention, and easily stay up-to-date with every property in their book of business.
Arden Insurance Services is a Managing General Agency (MGA) and was experiencing several challenges (e.g., inspection inefficiencies and lack of underwriting clarity). Location intelligence allows Arden’s underwriters to make faster, smarter decisions by providing them with the most accurate property information available. With this data, they can determine the precise risk for each policy and strategically deploy inspection teams to the highest-risk properties.
Commercial
Site surveying can be one of the most costly and time-consuming parts of any infrastructure project. Location intelligence allows stakeholders at all levels to access tools for remote surveying and site monitoring.
CBBEL undertook the task of connecting urban areas with a large, multi-use path project that intersected with a forest preserve. The path crossed environments that had different grade levels and habitats that needed to be preserved or rebuilt. CBBEL always uses aerial imagery to examine existing conditions. However, extensive tree coverage across the project area made getting clear imagery difficult.
That all changed when CBBEL went with Nearmap location intelligence, as the frequently updated imagery gave them leaf-off surveys where their team could see the pathway. Being able to do onsite work without going onsite helped to improve CBBEL’s efficiency by enabling their Field Collection and remote teams to simultaneously update the project area.
Disaster response
In areas where it is available, Nearmap ImpactResponse post-catastrophe ground insights equip disaster response crews with up-to-date data for assessing damage, deploying resources, and finding the safest recovery routes. With no need to wait for ground resources, or to resolve potentially dangerous access issues, disaster response teams can proactively create recovery plans without delay.
Real-world location intelligence
Location intelligence is revolutionising the field of GIS, providing decision-makers with the insights needed to address today’s most pressing challenges. By combining high-resolution aerial imagery, 3D modelling, and AI-driven analysis, GIS professionals and others can turn imagery into insights and answers. This allows for better decision-making, improved forecasting, and the ability to mitigate issues before they arise.
If you want to experience the benefits of location intelligence for yourself, try Nearmap — the leading provider of geospatial imagery, insights, and answers.