Towards data management of web-based spatial decision support: The case of facility network transformation analysis services

Abstract

Facility is the most important but costly channel for many enterprises to win in the customer-centric marketplace. How to optimize facility site network is part of the critical strategic nuts for executives. Many enterprises have adopted Geographic Information System (GIS) based solutions to support facility related business analysis, which, however, are usually based on desktop applications and are costly and need specialists' management. Thus in this paper, a light-weighted and easy-to-use web-based spatial decision support system on facility transformation analysis, iFAO (intelligent facility network analytics & optimization), is introduced. Employing web services technology, it could host facility related business analysis services for different enterprises in different industries. How to enable the information sharing and analysis collaboration, which we call data management, is one of the key issues in this servicehosting environment. After analyzing the characteristics of three types of data used in this kind of system, we introduce a common data management framework and three technologies to realize it. Besides, we present its detail implementations, a series of web services, which is also an extension to the OGC Service Architecture. The framework has been validated by the applications of iFAO in real banking and retail projects and it is also applicable to other web GIS based decision support solutions. © 2008 IEEE.