News

Developers Receive Another API Gift

• By Kathleen Ohlson
• September 20, 2005

SRC recently released a set of tools for developers that add business intelligence functionality to the Google mapping application programming interface.

The company’s Allocate engine and API help developers build mashups—business intelligence applications featuring geographically based content such as demographics, segmentation and sales data. Geographically based content, or geocontent, is any type of business and market data that’s inserted into a mapping application, allowing executives to review and analyze business operations and market opportunities for any area.

Allocate is a market analysis tool that manages, retrieves and displays proprietary and syndicated data, regardless of geography. It generates geocontent for reports, maps, charts, HTML files and other formats. Allocate is part of SRC’s Portfolio business intelligence platform.

The Allocate API accepts requests from Google Map and returns XML geo-content for any spatial object. Developers using the Allocate API and their preferred mapping API can build numerous business mashups, including market drive times, real estate details, corporate area sales volumes, telecommunications grids and signals, corporate or competitive sales territories, and maps with business intelligence featuring census and market data.

“Google has found a tremendous market opportunity among the pent-up demand of Web developers seeking to build map applications via its easy-to-use, open-source API,” says Dean Stoecker, SRC’s president and CEO. “This could very well represent the map ubiquity the [Geographic Information Systems] has been pursuing for years.”