Master Reference Files
The Datactics Master Reference Files allow you to capture knowledge about your business and to then utilize that knowledge in your data quality processes.
The Master Reference Files come pre-built with base information such as address information (e.g. towns, cities, postcode/zip code structures), name information for different languages, calendar references (e.g. days, months in a variety of languages), measurements etc. This reference information about your business can be added to as required. However, the power of the Master Reference Files comes in using your own knowledge about your data and incorporating that knowledge into the software.
Using Your Knowledge
The information you hold will be unique to your organization and typically contains specific terminology that can be used to enhance the quality of your data. Product data, for example, will contain language that describes SKUs both for appearance and operation. This terminology and other reference data are simply to enter, creating a Master Reference File specific to requirements.
Once a Master Reference File has been created it can be used for various operations. For example:
- when standardizing data an abbreviation can be expanded to its full term, e.g. 4WD or 4x4 may be replaced with 4 Wheel Drive.
- when making meaning of unstructured data such as free-form text fields, information can be found that matches patterns such as measurements and extracted into a new field.
Reference data can be searched for using fuzzy matching. Using this functionality it is possible to detect and correct spelling mistakes and regional differences, for example 'Grey' and 'Gray'.
The Datactics Product Suite handles multi-lingual data and is fully unicode enabled.
