Spatial Data Integration and Conflation

1Spatial is a global leader in spatial data integration and location master data management

We are leading the way in geospatial data integration with an extensive track record of client implementations across the United States, United Kingdom, Europe and Australia. Find out more about our approach to location master data management.

What is spatial data integration and conflation?

Spatial data is increasingly important for competitive advantage. But that data is frequently held in different places, in different formats and with different degrees of accuracy.

Organizations need a single source of spatial truth, a central data set they can trust.

Spatial data integration, or conflation, takes the best of every data set and combines it into a consistent and reliable whole data set. It lets you re-use existing data investments by matching disparate data sets and taking the best of each.

Even when your data is from different sources, in different formats, at different accuracy levels and collected over different periods of time, with data integration you can create a single, central and authoritative database.

Automated data integration

With 1Spatial’s powerful rules-based approach, data from departmental silos, large groups of partner organizations or third parties can be extracted and combined by automatically applying user-defined and user-managed rules.

Rules-based automation dramatically reduces the time and cost of integration. 1Spatial’s unique rules engine turns data integration from a major, annual project into an easy, ongoing process ensuring your data is always as current as possible. It allows users to combine the most accurate or up-to-date sources of data to get the best overall result

The 1Integrate patented rules engine uniquely automates data validation, cleaning, transformation and enhancement at scale.

It is a server-based application that allows users to define, create and run business rules across multiple sources and formats of data.

• Data validation

1Integrate can validate the data or fix common errors during integration, speeding up the time it takes to trust your data and build organizational confidence.

•  Divergent geometries     

The rules can be used to match divergent geometries based on the similarity of the objects’ shapes as well as their connectivity and attributes.

• Spatial and non-spatial data

Rules can access both spatial and non-spatial data.

• Data quality    

1Integrate assesses the quality of the data to improve, enhance or transform it into a more accurate, trusted and useable form.

• Continual evolution

The rules are centrally managed so over time they evolve and contribute to an ever growing ‘knowledge repository’

• Open data

It enables data to be enriched with free, open data.

• Efficient   

With 1Integrate, users can conflate data from multiple sources and formats efficiently

• Confidence

Rules can calculate a per-feature confidence score to allow users to review the results

• User interface

Rules can be defined via a web-based user interface and applied to data either via a user interface or programmatically via a web services API.

Common problems with spatial data analysis

It is often difficult to establish a measure of “spatial” similarity on which integration can be based, due to a number of reasons:

• datasets created at different times mean that some datasets are not aligned with more recent representations
• datasets have different structures, formats, meaning, scales, data models and segmentations
• datasets have varying levels of accuracy, granularity and precision
• the same objects are duplicated among different sources. For instance, a street can be represented as a single “line” feature in one dataset and as multiple “line” features in another.

To extract meaningful value from disparate data sets requires that the data be converted into common format and data model, which requires intelligent matching.

Due to the volume and the complexity of features in these datasets, manual conflation is, however, expensive and time consuming.

Shortcomings with traditional scripting, workbench-based and GIS tools

• Manual approaches are costly

A manual approach to data conflation is costly and time-consuming and often requires several human-years of work. Moreover, manual approaches are error-prone, due to tedious and repetitive human operations. 1Integrate enables reliable, repeatable and very fast automation of this task.

• Large volumes of data

Traditional scripting, GIS or workbench-based tools struggle to process large volumes of data. This is due to the need for frequent inter-feature checks in conflation projects. 1Integrate’s rules engine provides both powerful functionality, high performance and scalability over large datasets.

• Black boxes are restrictive

1Integrate is not a "black box": rules are authored and run using a collaborative web interface. This makes it possible to refine processing at any time, to add or modify rules, or to apply them to new datasets. In this way, an organization can build its catalogue of rules for its processes to improve the quality and integration of company data, connected to its ERP or any other computer system.

• Repeatability is limited 

The automation and minimal manual intervention means that an investment in 1Integrate can produce very large savings for repeated processes. The openness of the interface means that it can also be used for many other automatic validation and data processing tasks within the organization

• System compatibility

1Integrate is data and system agnostic. Due to the web-based interfaces, 1Integrate can be installed either on premise or made available as a cloud service.

Why 1Spatial?

We are a global leader in spatial data integration and location master data management. Our global clients include national mapping and land management agencies, utility companies, transportation organizations, government and defense departments.

In the USA, 1Spatial Inc has assisted several organizations with conflation projects in the USA over the past 10 years. We have successfully managed conflation projects for the US Census Bureau, Arizona DOT, Kansas DOT, Rhode Island and the State of Michigan. Find out more about our expertise.