The Importance of Data Currency and Data Consistency.
Data currency is monetary value assigned to data to identify itsfinancial significance to an organization. Once the monetary value of data assets is identified, it may be used as the unit of exchange in a transaction, either as the sole payment or in combination with money.
Direct financial models of data monetization include:• Identifying the cost of replacing data in the event of its loss.• Identifying the amount that data contributes to an organization’s revenue.• Identifying what the data could generate if sold.
For Attribute data, Data Currency and Data Consistency are veryimportant concepts. When you’ve finished reading this post you’llunderstand that you can’t just pick up an old dataset and blindlybelieve that it will meet your needs.
Data Currency:
Out-of-date data might be pivotal to your project if you’re interestedin analysing something from a long time ago. It can also be a majorproblem for your GIS project.Let’s think for a moment about Google Maps because data currency isparticularly important to it. Do you think people would want to useGoogle maps to find businesses and places if the information thatgoogle returned was out-of-date?For example, if a restaurant search returned a business that hadclosed 4 or 5 years ago, or a menu that was equally out of date. Datacurrency is critical to Google Maps. Although some of theirinformation is incorrect, google does a pretty good job of trying tokeep the information current.
Data Currency also relates to common GIS tasks such as Land Usemapping. An out-of-date map might show a cadastral block as being inan industrial zone, where in fact, in the last few years, the zone mayhave changed to be residential. It’s sometimes important to knowwhether a residential area was once industrial, what sort ofindustries were there, and previous ownership – especially whereenvironmental contamination issues are at stake.
Data Consistency:
Consistency in database systems refers to the requirement that any given database transaction must change affected data only in allowed ways. Any data written to the database must be valid according to all defined rules, including constraints, cascades, triggers, and any combination thereof.
Many government databases are in poor standing because they’ve notresolved the data consistency issue. The idea behind data consistencyis that you need to describe your data in a consistent way. Forexample, I was dealing with a Swimming Pool project for my stategovernment some years back. The database I was using was from theBuilding Inspector’s department. A database search for “Pool” produceddwellings with “Swimming Pools”, “Pools”, “Pool Fences”, “PoolTables”, and a number of other variations. The Department had noconsistent way of describing anything in their database, meaning thatit was near-useless for the project purpose.Another example would be a search in a restaurant database for aCantonese restaurant. Unless somebody is going to specifically besearching for a Cantonese Restaurant, its probably better to have itdescribed as a Chinese Restaurant. Another mistake that’s commonlymade in restaurant databases is to call a “restaurant” a “café”, tomis-spell it to be a “restrant”, or to abbreviate it somehow. If youhave a consistent way of spelling and representing the same sort ofthing in your database, that database is going to be far more powerfulthan it otherwise would have been.
Information Brought To You By Biovolt Corporation.
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