Location Intelligence

Location Intelligence is an area of rapid growth in various sectors and industries. Globally, the location intelligence market is valued at USD 14 billion in 2021, as part of a larger geospatial industry that has grown to be a worldwide market of USD 430 billion (Markets and Markets, 2021). This growth has been catalyzed by advances in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technology and its innovative deployment by organizations to produce location analytics and intelligence across a broad array of industries. The COVID-19 pandemic has also fueled the rapid deployment of location intelligence-based solutions by both public and private sector organizations to track and monitor the spread of the disease, mitigate risks, and develop sustainable strategies for business continuity.

The Location Intelligence track is now in its third year at HICSS and has steadily grown from one to three mini-tracks in the past three years. The three mini-tracks are –

• Location Analytics in System Sciences Research and Education,
• Geospatial Big Data Analytics, and
• GIS, Industry 4.0, and Sustainability.

The Location Analytics in Systems Sciences Research and Education mini-track aims to foster research and collaboration in the expansive, multidisciplinary area of locational intelligence. Seven papers in this mini-track examine conceptualization of location-based services (LBS), imagining the future of 5-G spatial urban scenarios, combination of IoT, GIS, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) for innovative solutions in auto insurance pricing, locational placement of cardiac resuscitation devices, spatial clustering intensity of mobile internet use, advanced modeling and simulation of K-12 student cohorts progressing over space and time, and experiments on estimating levels of trust through stationarity of mobile network nodes. These seven papers represent varied and useful innovations that showcase the potential of location analytics to advance system sciences research agendas.

The Geospatial Big Data Analytics mini-track aims to uncover the potential that geospatial big data presents as an emerging frontier of research and innovation in the system sciences and across various sectors and industries. Five papers in this mini-track showcase the use of geospatial big data to improve agricultural land use classification, examining the impacts of impacts of locational factors on customer satisfaction in the U.S. hospitality sector, evolution of corporate location planning, leveraging spatiotemporal data-based business knowledge for financial decision support, and the development of a model for providing real-time decision support for tourism planning using mobility-asa- service. Combined with geospatial big data are analytical methods and algorithms such as deep learning, genetic algorithms, and optimization modeling. These papers show the immense potential of geospatial big data analytics and resulting location intelligence to foster innovation in diverse disciplinary areas.

Finally, the GIS, Industry 4.0, and Sustainability mini-track provides a research forum aiming to discuss the varied facets of GIS for Industry 4.0 and sustainability. This year, three papers of this mini-track analyze food accessibility and social vulnerability, develop an optimization-based model for the development of public transport systems in rural areas, and offer a thorough review of GIS in information systems research. As GIS and location intelligence become central to the technology portfolio that underpins Industry 4.0, the papers in this mini-track offer key directions for expansion of system sciences research and scholarship with the aid of location analytics.

Overall, the Location Intelligence track has grown steadily over the past three years. A total of 15 accepted papers showcase interdisciplinary collaboration between authors spanning multiple countries and continents in disciplines as diverse as business, information systems, retail geography, operations research, environmental sciences, agriculture, public policy and administration to name a few. GIS often provides a hub for such interdisciplinary collaboration across disciplines. Despite the diversity of topics, the authors of these papers have not only identified key locational and geographic aspects of their research agenda but deployed innovative analytical methods including location analytics to offer location-based insights and deliver innovative solutions. This remains the key objective of this Track – to assist system sciences researchers across the spectrum uncover locational elements of their research agenda, formulate meaningful research questions underpinned by location/geography, and use appropriate location analytical methods to address such questions.

We wish to thank all the people whose initiative and drive has sustained the growth of this new Track. We appreciate the efforts of the mini-track chairs who have worked hard to welcome a variety of high-quality submissions and shepherd the review process with a group of committed reviewers. We welcome, and strongly solicit, your participation in this track at future HICSS conferences. Please contact us with your ideas for new minitracks or papers.

Thomas Horan
University of Redlands
Thomas_Horan@redlands.edu