How 1Integrate and FME can enable Location Master Data Management

Location Master Data Management

As organisations aim to optimise their use of their data, master data management has become a focus. Approximately 80% of all master data has a location aspect to it.  1Spatial’s Location Master Data Management (LMDM) ensures that your location data management process can be automated across your enterprise and by different technology platforms. Auditing, cleansing, synchronising, updating, and analysing different data, reduces time and cost, improves data quality, avoids data duplication, achieves data compliance and, and crucially provides, data that you can trust.

The 1Spatial Platform

The 1Spatial Platform is a complete set of software products for Location Master Data Management (LMDM), combining servers, portals, dashboards, SDKs, APIs, data connectors, business-focused applications and our patented 1Integrate rules engine.

The platform helps ensure your master location data is current, complete, consistent and coordinated – and that you can be confident it will remain that way as it evolves. It allows you to master your location data in any device or software, anywhere, anytime. The platform can be deployed as Software as a Service (SaaS) in the cloud, on-premise, or as a hybrid of both.

But how do we actually go about delivering LMDM, and what products can be used in the key stages to ensure data management?

FME Platform

We’ve spoken before about our great working relationship with partners, and how we collaborate with our partners and customers to deliver solutions.

The same is also true about how we work with Safe Software and users of the Safe Software FME (Feature Manipulation Engine) Platform. Our product managers, solution architects and consultants are constantly testing ideas and ensuring we have great integration points between the 1Spatial and FME Platforms.

We talked about how the 1Spatial Platform and FME can build trust in data, and how we have been building our 1Spatial Platform with FME in for over 20 years, so that they work in harmony. In fact the partnership started when I joined 1Spatial, back in 1999. Since then we have extended our reach with FME Certified Professionals helping us make the right decisions across all our operating territories (UK, US, Australia, France and Belgium).

The FME Platform is often used alongside our 1Spatial Platform products and their combined value enables organisations to adopt LMDM..

LMDM Cycle

The figure below below illustrates the four primary stages of the LMDM cycle – audit and cleanse, synchronise, update and analyse. The 1Spatial Platform and FME Platform products enabling each stage.

AUDIT and CLEANSE

We start with data preparation, extracting, transforming, and loading (ETL) data. The FME Platform enhances our ability to ETL so many data formats and resolve simple conflicts in schemas, domains, code lists or coordinate reference systems. As we audit and cleanse data, we can transform source data if required, and this can all be automated and scheduled within an FME workbench, ready for continual data updates.

MATCH and SYNCHRONISE

We then use spatial and non-spatial techniques in 1Integrate to identify where and how data in different systems connect together and manage and improve semantic consistency.

Data Profiling can be used to spot and understand anomalies, such as any missing data. A data quality assessment can then leverage these insights to help define the quality requirements of the data.

Our methods are encapsulated in a Rules Catalogue, where we can determine importance and priority of the rules, managing what is mandatory or optional and determine the interdependence between data elements and data quality rules. These rules are quickly authored in the no-code user interface, before being automatically deployed as a powerful working solution for customers.

1Integrate can be easily scaled for any enterprise solution or complex scenario, adding multiple engines to process large data loads and applying partitioning to parallelise processing of country-wide datasets.

UPDATE

Auditing and connecting data often reveals new innovative ideas on how to fix-up and improve the data, sometimes simply by re-using what you already have. We implement automated data cleansing and improvement processes, once again using our patented rules engine within 1Integrate.

We focus on moving change only updates around the system to minimise data handling, to maintain uniformity and keep different systems synchronised. The same techniques we used in the synchronisation process are re-used here to separate concerns and design for testability.

ANALYSE

Our solutions then help our customers make business-critical decisions and support initiatives using the output from the previous processes, focussed to gain richer insights.

Our dashboarding and visualisation techniques, in 1Spatial’s Platform products such as 1Data Gateway and 1Integrate allow people to view and monitor quality issues and trends, as well as audit logs and reports for data stewards to manage their work and be transparent and accountable for their data.

Our targeted app solutions help our customers maximise the use of master location data for their business operations and decision making.

An Ongoing, Automated LMDM Cycle

The LMDM cycle is then complete, and fully automated. The FME Platform can be used to return data to its original, or different, formats as needed, before the LMDM cycle recommences.

Flexible Deployment: SaaS, On-Premise or Hybrid

In addition to making sure the 1Spatial Platform has the right technical functionality, we also ensure our customers can access it in a fast, secure and cost-effective way. Cloud deployment means customers can get access to our software and tools almost instantly. However, if the situation demands the deployment may be better suited within their own secure enterprise infrastructure, we have designed our software so that all of our 1Spatial Platform components are built to support the full range of architectures.

Changes in 1Integrate 3.4 include a new FME Server data store, allowing data to be passed to an FME Workspace, transformed, and then returned, ready for validation or enhancement. Building upon 1Spatial’s close partnership with SAFE software, users can now combine the unique capabilities of 1Spatial’s rules engine with the extensive range of FME transformations capabilities of the FME platform which opens a whole world of opportunity – we are really excited to see how this gets used.

To find out more, please get in touch.