The first six chapters of this book have shown you how powerful data visualization can be. You should understand by now the insight a bar chart or a scatter plot can add to a tabular representation of data.

Spatial analytics is a relatively new area of data visualization. We are all used to using geographic information systems (GIS) like Google Maps. It is much easier to give directions using an interactive map than using text instructions, and the language is universal. Moreover, this concept can be explored to create analytics contexts that are simply not possible with traditional tables and charts. If you stretch your imagination just a little, you will also quickly realize that you don't have to confine your analysis to geographic locations. Any spatial context—a silicon chip, an MRI scan, a baseball field—can be mapped and combined with other data to do spatial analytics.

The world of business intelligence lags behind popular culture, and spatial analytics...