GeoBI and Big VGI for Crime Analysis and Report

Abstract

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) have left being a tool for academics and specialist enterprises and it is becoming a massive tool. Initially, citizens had a passive interaction about this kind of systems, which were used to retrieve data of interest on a map, however their role has changed and has become a major contributor of geographic information. Different organizations and specialized enterprises that generated geographic information, nowadays are creating platforms to let citizens contribute with information, this phenomenon is called Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) and usually generates big amounts of data. The potential of the VGI is huge, according to its context can bring commercial or social advantages. For this it is necessary to process appropriately the big amount and heterogeneity of available data. In this scenario is when the tools of Business Intelligence (BI) can contribute. This article aims to show how BI can bring tools to interpret the huge amount of information that VGI generates. For this, we took crimes reports and incidents in a VGI platform as an application. In this domain we propose how BI analysis can improve the efficiency and effectiveness of managing the Big Data available.