Spatial database system for generation of weather event and risk reports

• US 20070214023A1
• Filed: 03/07/2007
• Published: 09/13/2007
• Est. Priority Date: 03/08/2006
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Guy Carpenter & Company LLC (Marsh & McLennan Cos., Inc.)
• Original Assignee: Guy Carpenter & Company LLC (Marsh & McLennan Cos., Inc.)
• Inventors: Adams, Bryan, Soh, Elizabeth, Mathai, Shajy, Samuel, Shaju, Andaloo, Kiran, Mangano, John
• Granted Patent: US 7,949,548 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 705/4
• CPC Class Codes: G01W 1/00 Meteorology
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/29 Geographical information databases
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 40/00 Finance; Insurance; Tax strategies; Processing of corporate or income taxes
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 40/08 Insurance
• CPC Class Codes: Y02A 90/10 Information and communication technologies [ICT] supporting adaptation to climate change, e.g. for weather forecasting or climate simulation

Abstract

The present invention is a tool including a spatial database and a data warehouse used to track portfolio sites that are affected by weather events, such as hurricanes, earthquakes, wildfires, hail, tornados, or manmade events. A spatial database provides rich spatial geometry features using earth longitude and latitude as a 2-D reference system in spatial system. A insurer portfolio site, which is defined by longitude and latitude data, includes portions that are represented as a point. A weather event is represented as polygon in the spatial database. Based on user configured threshold values, it may be determined when a point falls inside, or on a boundary, of a polygon to identify a site that is affected by that weather event and corresponding reports may be generated, including maps identifying the affected sites and total insured value calculations for the affected sites, in order to gauge risk.

Claims

1. A system for generating weather event reports comprising:

a spatial database containing insurer portfolio data, including a point that graphically represents a portion of the insurer portfolio data, and the spatial database containing weather data including boundary information;

an impact analysis tool for determining the point that is affected by the weather data by locating the point that falls within the boundary information; and

a reporting engine for generating a report including mapped weather data and the point affected by the weather data.

2. The system of claim 1 further comprising an orchestration tool that sorts the weather data and insurer portfolio data based on a user defined threshold value.

3. The system of claim 2 wherein the threshold value includes a date range, weather event, geographic area, TIV range or property value that are received by an automatic notification server (ANS) to generate a report for the user.

4. The system of claim 1 wherein the system loads the weather data at least once every twenty-four hours and the system includes a mapping engine for mapping the weather data and providing a data warehouse to store the insurer portfolio data.

5. The system of claim 1 wherein the weather data includes at least tornado, hail, wind, earthquake, water surge, hurricane track, hurricane wind area, hurricane wind path data, fires or terrorist attack.

6. The system of claim 1 further comprising an orchestration tool to process user configurable threshold values that assist the mapping engine in preparing the mapped weather data.

7. The system of claim 1 wherein the spatial database provides polygons representative of weather data boundary information and the impact analysis tool that matches the insurer portfolio data with the polygons.

8. The system of claim 7 wherein the polygons are converted to weather related latitude and longitude coordinates and matched to insurance data related latitude and longitude coordinates.

9. The system of claim 7 wherein the insurer portfolio data is assigned a policy site ID number and the polygon is assigned a feature ID number and where both are stored in a data warehouse.

10. The system of claim 1 wherein the weather data is sporadic real-time data and additional catastrophe data may be processed including terrorist acts.

11. The system of claim 1 wherein the insurer portfolio data includes insured dollar values for individual insured properties and the report includes display of the dollar values for each point affected by the weather data.

12. A method of generating integrated data reports comprising the steps of:

loading insurer portfolio data including geographic sites into a spatial database;

feeding boundary data into the spatial database;

using an impact tool to determine which of the geographic sites have been affected by the boundary data; and

generating a report of the affected geographic sites and identifying risk areas based on the insurer portfolio data.

13. The method of claim 12 wherein the report may be generated from an internet web portal.

14. The method of claim 13 wherein the insurer portfolio data is loaded by a insurer from the web portal.

15. The method of claim 12 further comprising a data warehouse that connects to a reporting engine to display the affected sites and insurance metrics in a grid.

16. The method of claim 12 wherein a user can select to view a map of the affected sites and then request a map server to obtain the map by providing unique feature grids of the boundary and portfolio data stored as a shape file in the spatial database.

17. The method of claim 12 wherein a map server connects to the spatial database to get spatial information and then generate the report.

18. The method of claim 13 wherein the report is passed to the reporting engine in order to display the report.

19. The method of claim 12 wherein a insurer may subscribe to the system to receive reports to be transmitted at least daily by a reporting engine.

20. The method of claim 19 wherein the reporting engine runs all the subscribed reports overnight and saves the results as a cache file.

21. The method of claim 20 wherein when a user logs onto the website and runs subscribed reports, the search hits the cache file and a report is returned to the insurer'"'"'s desktop.

22. The method of claim 12 wherein the boundary data includes severe history, tornado, hail, wind gust, earthquakes, wildfires, hurricanes, precipitation, water surge, fire or terrorist attack data in a geospatial form.

23. The method of claim 12 wherein the boundary data is collected from various locations and the data is transformed into polygons and points on a map depicted in the report.

24. The method of claim 23 wherein the spatial database uses each point to represent an insurance portfolio site and each polygon represents a weather related event.

25. The method of claim 24 wherein the affected geographic site is identified when the point is found inside or on a boundary of the polygon.

26. The method of claim 23 wherein an impact tool implements a java application in order to find all the points that are falling with in the polygon by using spatial queries.

27. The method of claim 26 wherein the spatial query operates by matching latitude and longitude data for each point with latitude and longitude data for each polygon.

28. The method of claim 27 wherein affected geographic sites and weather related events are loaded into a data warehouse.

29. The method of claim 12 wherein an automated synchronization tool is run every week in order to synchronize the data and an impact tool is run every night to integrate the weather data.

30. The method of claim 12 wherein a insurer provides insurance portfolio data to a website in various formats including flat files, Excel or SQL server database.

31. The method of claim 30, wherein the website cleans, transforms and loads the insurance portfolio data into a data warehouse.

32. The method of claim 12 wherein longitude and latitude data for the portfolio data is integrated by an orchestration tool by using a synchronization tool or a java application.

33. The method of claim 32 wherein a spatial point is constructed by using the longitude and latitude data for all inputted portfolio data.

34. The method of claim 33 wherein the portfolio data along with newly created spatial point is loaded into the spatial database.

35. A computer system for analysis and display of weather and insurer portfolio data comprising:

an end user device including a computer-readable signal-bearing medium;

a receiving circuit in the medium to receive client portfolio data including geographic address data;

a transmitting circuit in the medium for transmitting the geographic address data to a processor;

a selection circuit in the medium for selecting weather event data parameters and transmitting the parameters to the processor for correlating the weather event data parameters with the geographic address data in order to generate boundary data related to the geographic address data that has been affected by the weather event data; and

a display circuit in the medium to generate and display graphic images depicting the boundary data, so that such graphic images may be used to conduct risk analysis.

36. The system of claim 35 wherein the display circuit includes logic for determining threshold values to be selected by a user in order to orchestrate the insurer portfolio data.

37. The system of claim 35 wherein the geographic address is a point provided by a spatial database and the weather event data is a polygon and the logic determines when the point is at or within the polygon.

38. The system of claim 35 wherein the processor includes a data warehouse, a spatial database, an impact analysis tool and a mapping engine server interconnected in order to process real-time weather data and correlate the insurer portfolio data.

39. The system of claim 38 wherein an automatic notification server is connected to the data warehouse in order to trigger a reporting engine to display the integrated report.

40. The system of claim 35 wherein the geographic address and weather event data include latitude and longitude coordinates and are compared in order to generate a graphical map where the coordinates overlap.