Spatial Data Quality Control Briefing

01 August 2007, 5:52pm

Salford GIS, the first 1Spatial Radius Studio Practitioner in the United Kingdom, recently held a half-day seminar entitled ‘Spatial Data - Fit for Purpose? Fit for Sharing?’ at the URBIS in Manchester. The event, geared for GIS managers and IT consultants, was well attended by a cross-section of Local Government and private sector organisations.

The Seminar focused on the ‘fit for purpose’ key message by outlining a methodology that enables organisations to discover how spatial data conforms to business rules, how to highlight any errors breaking those rules or exceptions to the rules and rectify the discrepancies. By doing this, organisations can ensure the integrity, and compliance, of their spatial data once it has been certified as ‘fit for purpose’.

Chris Nelson, Director of Salford GIS, provided the introduction for the seminar by highlighting the value of spatial data quality control and how this impacts business efficiency. Mike Sanderson, CEO of 1Spatial presented around this theme on ‘Spatial Data Quality - A Forgotten Common Sense.’ Paul Coward, also of Salford GIS then presented on ‘Data Quality Assessment’, outlining the process around producing fit for purpose data through the rules-based conformance checking and data cleaning capabilities of 1Spatial’s Radius Studio Product. This was followed by two case studies, taken from Local Authorities, demonstrated by Nick Hall, Technical Director at Salford GIS.

Paul Coward, Director, Salford GIS, commented:

"With our traditional desktop GIS approach to checking data quality we would typically only be able to analyse 1 or maybe 2 layers at a time. With complex queries the processing could take many hours with standard desktop GIS and after hours of processing we would regularly find that the query needed to be re-written. With Radius Studio real interoperability is possible because we can process multiple layers from multiple data stores. The performance gains are significant, seconds or minutes compared to hours, and at the same time we can quantitatively measure the data quality levels."

Steven Ramage, Business Development Director at 1Spatial added:

"We are delighted that as a recognised, leading independent consultancy, Salford GIS, our first Radius Studio Practitioner in the United Kingdom, was able to demonstrate the value of using Radius Studio so quickly. It is important for us to work with expert partners like this in the 1Spatial Community, our partner network. As pioneers of the Radius Studio Practitioner Programme they join other international partners like Simon Greener in Australia and TerraLogik in Canada. This type of collaboration is essential for successful partnering and we were very pleased with the high calibre of attendees."

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