Esri’s Latest Release of Business Analyst Web with Enhanced Features

Business Analyst Has a New Interface 

The new Esri modern design minimizes clutter for an improved experience, especially on tablets. Increased speed means more responsiveness, usability, and greater accessibility - like better support for keyboards and touchscreens while accommodating motor and visual impairments. 

New features include:

• An improved interface

• Data browser search improvements

• New color-coded maps workflow

• New infographic templates

• Major data updates

• Support for Spanish

• Enhancements to the BA Widget in ArcGIS Experience Builder 

Artificial Intelligence Comes to the Data Browser

Business Analyst is data-rich, with 12,000 variables for the United States and more than 35,000 worldwide. In this release, we  added AI-powered semantic search to eliminate challenges. BA Web search now feels more like a natural conversation. We taught it a vast range of concepts and data stories based on Esri's own data and the industries we serve, and its individual components are categorized by machine learning algorithms. 

Prior to this release, the data search engine looked for literal matches to query words or keyword search and matching. Now it understands concepts and whole sentences. In the past, if “Pain” was typed into the search field, 27 attributes were displayed, including matches that contained the word “Paint” because it used a prefix search. With semantic search, 49 results appear, including attributes with “Paint.”

Paint is matched because it is the only concept in the search, and the “t” may be a typo, so all results, including potential errors, are returned.

With this release, if “patient pain” is typed into the search field, the historic search generates no results because those words don't match any description. A semantic search generates 96 results! These include results like urgent care vs. doctor's office, health insurance enrollment, specific pain relief, and associated terms. We use similar techniques for AI Chat tools and search capacities available on the web.

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New Redesigned Color-coded Maps and Mapping Experiences

Color-coded maps is the first major redesigned workflow that benefits from the overhaul of the Business Analyst application logic and user interface components. It's used to visualize, understand, and identify important patterns and trends with a single variable or a set of two related topics. With this release, we enhanced and reorganized the workflow to simplify choosing what to analyze and how it's visualized. One-click mapping styles, variable selection, and filtering make it easy to perform data exploration and quickly spot opportunities and patterns in the data.

The new multi-level data explorer is more intelligent and faster. It allows the user to set and analyze data with a default area of interest, like city, county, or state, and the map only displays data within the area of interest. It uses new intelligent agent sorts based on the most populous and popular geographic region, filtering results dynamically.

The modified results pane provides data summaries, charts, and interactive exploration, including improved tables, exports, and graphing tools. It can highlight the top and bottom five areas under analysis while filtering controls produce specific results- a better analysis experience with consistent and interpretable visualization.

Save work and save templates have been added in the new release. If a template is saved, open it again and change the search parameters to a new location using saved presets. Saved color-coded maps can be added to infographics and shared with other ArcGIS Online products like Experience Builder, Story Maps, and Dashboards.

Content contributor: Helen Thompson, CRE | Content and Applied Analytics | Esri

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