Geospatial presentation of purchase transactions data

This paper presents a simple automatic system for small and middle Internet companies selling goods. The system combines temporal sales data with its geographical location and presents the resulting information on a map. Such an approach to data presentation should facilitate understanding of sales structure. This insight might be helpful in generating ideas on improving sales strategy; consequently improving revenues of the company. The system is flexible and generic - it can be adjusted to process and present the data within different levels of administrative division areas, using different hierarchies of sold goods. While describing the system, we also present its prototype that visualizes the data in an interactive way on a three-dimensional map.

I. Introduction

COMPANIES selling goods have many possible ways to devise strategies of improving their business model and adjusting it to changing business conditions. One of them is to use business intelligence tools to automatically gather, process, analyze and visualize data that is important for the company in hope of obtaining useful insights that can be used to improve company's functioning. One of the most promising and simple approaches to this problem is to combine company's private data with publicly available data in order to obtain a useful synthesis of these two. An independent problem is how to handle and integrate different dimensions of company's data. One of the dimensions is the temporal one: the business conditions change over time and the company's decision-makers have to be able to follow changing trends in order to e.g. predict future behavior of the market. Another important dimension is the spatial one: different administrative regions have different business environments, and different business strategies might be more or less suitable for different sales areas (e.g. some regions might need more billboard advertisements while others might need more on-line advertisements).