What is the current best practice for reference data management, including spatial reference data?
The following questions/details need to be considered in the review:
How should spatial and non-spatial reference data be stored within an organisation?
– General industry best practice
– To maintain data quality
– To reduce duplication
– To enable users and systems simple access to it
– To enable access to previous versions of datasets
How can changes to spatial and non-spatial reference data be managed, in a collaborative way, so that:
– Interested stakeholders can make comments and propose changes
– Other stakeholders can view comments and proposed changes
– Manual effort is reduced
– An approvals process can be followed
– Changes can be communicated to interested stakeholders
How can systems which use the reference data be built to handle changes to that data?
– What are the best-practice design principles?
– How can systems be made aware of changes to reference data?
– How can the impact of the change be assessed quickly?
– How can the change to reference data be implemented with minimum effort/cost?
What are the best practices for supporting reporting and analysis which utilises reference data?
– What are the properties of good reference data?
– Use of metadata to describe reference data sets
– Maintaining historical information and details of changes, i.e. version control
– What is needed to support the use of reproducible reporting pipelines?
What are the benefits of following best practice?
What are the potential barriers to or problems with following best practice?
1 or 2 examples of organisations (ideally government/public sector) implementing a best practice approach detailing what they did and the benefits/challenges
