Location, location, location
Another aspect of master reference data is its spatial representation. Spatial information becomes more and more important (think Google Earth) and therefore the proper management of location, shape, orientation, etc. becomes very important. Using a spatial location is a very intuitive way of finding information, and after all the freebies from Google Earth and the upsurge of TomTom type of devices the spatial information is now firmly on our 'map' of data management.A starting point is to have a standard coordinate reference system (CRS) agreed in the company. Each country (or in some cases even regions) may have a different CRS and therefore it is important to choose a common standard. The most common are WGS84 or UTM. Different coordinate systems for the same point can lead to a mismatch of 100's of meters.
The second thing is related to the 'spatialisation' process. Usually the spatial representation of an object is stored in spatially enable Oracle database, but quite often this is a different data base than where the original source of the data is. In a way you can compare the spatial information with an index - it helps you to find the object in a defined space. But when the spatialisation is not standardised, or not owned by anybody, than there will be quality issues with the data very soon.
Having a spatial index in place centrally is useful, but if you have a large environment this may not be practical. Too much centralisation can lead to security complexities, synchronisation issues and preformance problems. The best thing is to have a strategy to store the spatial information together with the master reference data, whilst using a standardised spatialisation service. Than you can re-use the security of the master data source and render the information anyway you like - in a table, on a graph and also on a map!
Labels: master reference data
posted by Evert Ruijs @ 12:12 PM
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