Accurate data is the key to information and decision-making superiority

The Joint Geographical Establishment (EGI-Etablissement Géographique Interarmées) is, for the French armed forces, the military centre director for geography, that is to say the centre of technical and operational expertise in the field of joint geography at both national and international level.

It provides daily qualified digital products to all agencies of the Ministry of the Armed Forces. These products can be used in particular to implement precision weapons, carry out automatic field monitoring or constitute a database on which geospatial intelligence will be based -GEOINT[1], it is essential to guarantee their geometric and semantic quality

"As the guarantor of the quality of the data of the geographical database of the armies, the EGI is committed to disseminating qualified data that respects the STANAG[2] standard. Some data, usually produced in the field, do not always meet these standards. It is then impossible to use them or integrate them into the database. 1Integrate will allow the EGI to validate and correct these datasets in an automated way, thus avoiding time-consuming manipulations. " says Amélie M, Technical Director of the Joint Geographic Establishment.

Following the encouraging results of a previous "Proof of concept” with 1Spatial in 2017, the EGI wished to continue this experiment in order to set an automatic vector data correction and qualification process in the long term.

1Spatial deployed an off-the-shelf solution at EGI, based on 1Integrate software. This program provides a turnkey geospatial data detection and correction process that is particularly configurable for data validation. It includes:

• Processing tuning tools that validate the quality of the data to ensure that it complies with specifications.
• Data validation/enhancement capabilities for other data models produced by the EGI;
• Automatic correction of non-compliant objects through automation via detection rules, followed by flexible and efficient correction actions;
• Extensive reporting capabilities to better document errors and flag non-compliant objects.

1Spatial supported the EGI by implementing about twenty specific detection rules and associated correction actions. The configuration of these rules and actions on the data took place according to an agile methodology (2 sprints of 10 days) with a backlog listing in order of priority the errors that the EGI wanted to correct. 1Spatial has thus provided the rules to correct the most frequently detected errors.

As part of the delivery, training days were provided. This training will allow EGI operators to be autonomous in setting up new rules for other types of data.

The 1Integrate solution was selected for its ability to provide automated validation, cleaning, transformation and enhancement processes for vector data. It allows to evaluate the quality of the data to ensure that it compliant with the selected specifications and ready for use. The 1Integrate product can also be used for data re-engineering tasks such as data cleansing, transformation or creation of new data from other existing information sources.

[1] Geospatial Intelligence
[2] STANAG Standardisation Agreement