Building professional geo-analytical dashboards and reports with GeoBIExt

Geospatial Business Intelligence (GeoBI), combining GIS and BI technologies, has recently stirred marked interest for the huge potential of combining spatial analysis and map visualization with proven BI tools and techniques such as data warehousing (DW), On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP), ... A complete open source GeoBI suite is now available at http://www.spatialytics.org. It comprises: 1) GeoKettle, a spatial ETL tool targeted for geo-analytical data warehousing, 2) GeoMondrian, a Spatial OLAP (SOLAP) server which extends the open source Mondrian OLAP server with GIS data types and functions and 3) GeoBIExt (extending the formerly known SOLAPLayers project), a rich client visualization framework for SOLAP data, using GeoExt/OpenLayers as the web mapping front-end. It enables the creation of drillable and interactive geo-analytical dashboards or more static reports, which allow the analyze of data through different representations (maps, charts and cross-tabs) and levels of detail in order to take more informed and hence better decisions. The GeoBIExt framework is composed of a server part which acts as a relay between the different data sources and the client part for interactive visualisation and exploration of geo-analytical data.

This presentation focusses on GeoBIExt and proposes a practical introduction to this new framework. Its architecture will then be presented and from different data sources combining SOLAP and OLAP servers, geospatial data sources: DBMS, Shapefile, WFS, ..., attendees will learn how to build simple queries that could feed a geo-analytical dashboard or report. Different supported ouput formats will be explored (dedicated JSON encoding for interactive vizualisation, image, KML, ...). Alternating between short presentations of the different GeoBIExt components and progressive examples, attendees will so explore the different powerful functionalities it offers and will know, step by step, how to build rich, professional and interactive geo-analytical dashboards with it.