Quality data is vital to any system, including GIS. We can provide
you with a range of data audit services including:
- Identifying and documenting all sources of spatially related
data within your organisation
- Reporting on the qualitative and quantitative properties of
your data
- Producing metadata reports which identify the source, lineage
and other important details about your data
- Identifying risk associated with bad data - how critical / important
is the data and to whom
- Assessing data quality and completeness against specific criteria
- Producing data improvement plans including cost-benefit analysis
- Providing data quality assurance
Data Validation and Cleaning
Data validation and data cleaning are one of the most critical
components of any GIS project. The quality of any GIS solution
is reliant on the quality of GIS data. We realise the fundamental
importance of data quality and have extensive experience of data
validation and cleaning for our many clients.
The range of our
services include:
- Providing data validation services to ensure quality ready-to-use
data that will give you the results you really require
- Standardising your data to conform with the requirements of
your internal business systems and business needs
- Cleaning your data to remove any errors which will skew key
data modelling and spatial analysis
- Removing all duplicates from your data
- Matching your data to a key address and spatial databases,
such as GeoDirectory
- Tagging you data to quickly identify data records of key importance
- Cleaning your data to remove overshoots, undershoots, sliver
polygons, etc.
- If gaps are identified in you data we can provide full data
capture / creation services to preserve and enhance the quality
of your data. (See Data capture & conversion)
Geocoding
Geocoding involves attaching grid co-ordinates or spatial/map
references to a record based on the address information contained
in that record. The record is normally geocoded against an existing
geo-referenced data source such as GeoDirectory. Once the record
has been geo-coded, it can viewed in a GIS (eg. MapInfo® Professional®)
and easily related to other spatially referenced data, based on
its spatial or geographic location.
The geocoding process usually involves cleaning and restructuring
your data to optimise the chance of matching to a geocoded database,
as client databases are often poorly structured and incomplete.
Your data therefore benefits from the database cleaning process.
We can supply you with geocodes in a number of different ways
eg.:
- Your data geocoded to different levels of granularity or geographic
detail eg. to address, Townland or DED.
- Your data tagged with only the geocode (X & Y co-ordinates)
- Your data tagged with full GeoDirectory addresses or other
details such as consumer type etc.
We can provide geo-coding services to you, or supply you with
the software (GeoLocator) and data (GeoDirectory)products to
do it yourself.
Data capture and conversion involves converting your data into
a format that can be viewed and analysed in a GIS. Your data may
be in numerous digital and hardcopy formats.
Our services include:
- Data collection to capture data required as an input into
the GIS
- Converting your data to a GIS format includes scanning,
feature recognition, raster-to-vector conversion, etc.
- Image processing to convert images to comply with GIS requirements
- Digitising, both heads up and heads down digitising of data
- Adding value to existing datasets by attributing them with
business data, lifestyle data, third party data, etc.
Data Optimisation and integration
We have extensive knowledge of integrating your GIS data into
complimentary business systems, databases and processes. GIS data
should never be thought of as stand alone data, needing dedicated
GIS staff required to share the data with the rest of your organisation.
GIS data should be widely available for different departments
that need to access geographic information, such as sales, marketing,
CRM, technical, etc.
We can provide data optimisation and integration consultation
to assist you in disseminating your GIS data throughout your entire
organisation. GIS data can be integrated within your corporate
data model or seamlessly incorporated into your data warehouse.
Whatever your corporate data configuration we can offer optimisation
and integration services.
Data Strategy
A data strategy is critical to ensure that your GIS data is constantly
kept up to date and to ensure that your data gives you the benefits
that you require. We are experts in defining data management strategies
that follow defined project management principles, applied to
your specific business needs. We can provide consultation on internal
maintenance programs or on outsourcing service level agreements.
Our experience in implementing both software and data components
of GIS projects enables us to advise you on best practice data
strategies. Our workflows cover all elements of maintaining your
GIS data within your corporate structure.
We can help you answer these critical questions:
- What data do we need - from where - why is it needed?
- How can we best to get it?
- How do we maintain it?
- What systems/processes are required?
- What are the cost-benefits?
- What are our data sharing requirements - how do we achieve
this?
- How do we integrate with existing corporate data models -
data warehousing?
- What Service Level Agreements do we require - should we outsource?
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Overview
