OREANDA-NEWS. June 14, 2011.  Fujitsu today announced the July launch of its new SPATIOWL(1) cloud service that employs location data gathered from vehicles and a variety of sensors.

SPATIOWL consists of two different service types: platform-provisioning service and task-oriented services. The platform-provisioning service uses probe data(2) collected from moving vehicles and vast amounts of location data gathered from various sensors. This diverse assortment of data is analyzed in real-time and delivered through cloud computing as a functional group that is linked with external data. This enables, for instance, corporate and other group customers to develop unique services that employ location-based data to create new value, such as those for reporting traffic information in real-time, those that facilitate urban planning, and the delivery of new services to local residents.

The task-oriented services will be offered in a menu of immediately available services that include traffic information and routing support services for commercial vehicles. In the future, Fujitsu intends to expand this services menu, while at the same time offering services that are even more accurate due to an increase in the amount of data collected.

Fujitsu aims to utilize information and communication technology (ICT) to bring about a human-centric intelligent society in which people can live more prosperous and secure lives. As a way to make this happen, Fujitsu is working to leverage massive volumes of data by capturing and analyzing the vast amounts of data generated by human activity and the movement of things, and harnessing it to develop new insights. SPATIOWL marks the company's first foray into services that enable this.

With the emergence of new mobile devices, PCs, and mobile phones, as well as new services, and due to advances in sensor technologies, in recent years people have been overwhelmed by information in every area of daily life. This has led to a variety of new potential applications—for instance, given the world's roughly one billion automobiles(3), there is the potential to deliver new value by collecting and putting information on these vehicles to use.

By leveraging Fujitsu's expertise in delivering data services to people on the move, and by bringing together vast amounts of location data that have until now been handled separately, the company has made it possible for these different collections of location data to be cross-referenced and mutually supplemental. SPATIOWL is a service that provides such location data to meet the needs of customers.
Service Features
1. Correlates and analyzes large volumes of heterogeneous data

The service organizes many categories of data—including probe data from taxis and commercial vehicles, data from people and buildings, sensor data, and Internet data—into layers and then configures the locations into coordinates, thereby enabling correlation and analysis.
2. Delivery as a cloud service for quick and inexpensive use

Building from scratch a system that can collect and process large volumes of data in real-time requires considerable investments in time and resources. By offering as a cloud service, customers can use only the necessary services and analysis results, thereby making for a quick and inexpensive process.
3. Combines data from both Fujitsu and customers to produce new and unique services

Customers can combine their own data of various types with Fujitsu's commercial-vehicle data and taxi-probe(4) data to develop new services.