Eat, sleep, create rules, repeat

Charley Glynn, Senior Product Manager at 1Spatial, describes how 1Integrate enables collaborative working across an organisation.

With data increasingly forming the foundation of evidence for decision-making, we are all striving to make the most of our core data assets.

We’re all familiar with the requirement to make our data useful and usable for a specific project, and to make it trusted and reliable for that purpose. But if we truly want to maximise its value across the organisation, we should embrace a more “enterprise” approach, and consider re-use wherever possible.

Let's take a look at how 1Integrate can help with this across multiple teams and projects, and how it enables collaborative working.

Collaboration

Collaborative working is increasingly important as more companies embrace distributed working practices. New methodologies are being widely adopted to enable teams to work together wherever they are located, and to be able to seamlessly pick up where they left off, regardless of where their desk might be that day.

It's also true that savings can be made by sharing knowledge and resources between projects or between departments, minimising duplicated efforts, siloed knowledge, and starting from scratch every time.

1Integrate provides automated yet flexible data management processes that can be shared, are repeatable, and are always applied consistently and objectively.

No-code, rules-based approach

Our rules-based approach enables you to easily manage, share and discuss rules with everyone in your team. The no-code, “human friendly” approach to rule writing makes it easy to understand what a rule or action is designed to do.

Rules can be broken down into re-usable “chunks” to save re-writing the same logic each time, and the use of comments allows you to capture updates, notes and ideas at the point of use.

Using this approach, any team in an organization could dip into a centralized rules catalogue and easily interpret and re-use rules in various projects.

Version Control

The Synchronisation Tool enables multiple rule authors to work together, without stressing that they might overwrite changes.

Once again, a collaborative, centralized approach can be employed so that rule authors can grab existing rules and make changes to be shared, or create branched rules using the same core logic.

Read more about this feature to find out the benefits of version control workflows.

Reporting and process integration

Generating and sharing data quality reports and metrics allows publication and discussion of any issues found. Lessons learned can be shared between teams, and rules and processes improved.

The REST API gives you access to all of 1Integrates capabilities, allowing you to easily connect different systems and embed data validation into your workflows.

Centralised and Accessible

Our rules-based approach is a form of knowledge management, where your rules are the encoding of your experts’ knowledge, experience and skills as a set of centrally stored rules. 1Integrate makes ongoing maintenance of the rules catalogue much easier and less risky than other approaches.

It's more beneficial if your teams’ knowledge is extracted and stored as a reusable ruleset rather than in people’s heads or hidden in bespoke software. The 1Integrate repository, managed in a simple folder structure, can be viewed and browsed by anyone with permission. They include comments and descriptions and can be backed up and managed via tools like Git to allow multiple users to safely work in parallel. Individual entities can also be easily transferred between repositories by using a simple backup and restore capability via the user interface or API.

Secure and Scalable

1Integrate provides secure and resilient storage for this important enterprise information.

Your repository of rules which can be shared across multiple engines, enabling enterprise level scalability. As your usage grows, engines add more processing power so that more tasks can be carried out in parallel.

1Integrate can also be accessed via the cloud. Read more about the benefits of the scalable and secure 1Spatial Platform in the cloud.

Re-use of your Rules

We have mentioned how flexible 1Integrate is, and one aspect of that is the way it enables re-use. This is particularly salient to the creation and sharing of rules. Re-purposing entire rules can save time and effort, and there are ways that the creation of new rules can be sped up too.

Here are some quick tips:

• Copy and paste components of a rule and reuse them in multiple sessions.
• Superclasses can help you create shareable, generic rules that are great for similar datasets (e.g. check for overlapping polygons in any geometric dataset).
• Utilise templates to save time and make common rules easily repeatable.
• Session Parameters can be used to pass in dynamic values on-the-fly.
• Common Data Stores reduce the need for moving data around unnecessarily.

See our top tips for optimising performance - save time as you scale.

Here’s a list of case studies, where 1Integrate has been helping customers solve problems using some of the collaborative techniques described above.