A place for anecdotes and moans, opinions and contemplations about data/information quality and international data.
One of the major frustrations that I have experienced in the past 30 years working on international data is the level of ignorance of basic geography which permeates companies holding international data and those people employed to manage that data. Worse, there are too many companies claiming to be experts in validating and managing this data who take the approach that they only need to know a…
I stopped charging for access to the Global Sourcebook for International Data Management ( https://www.grcdi.nl/gsb/ ) in November 2014 – almost ten years ago. I wanted the information to be made as widely available as possible, and administering the paid version updates was laborious - I hoped instead to be able to cover my costs and continuing workload through sponsorship and donations. After…
I must finally admit defeat – social media has got the better of me. It was never going to be easy. Neurodiverse and social are never going to be comfortable bedfellows, added to which is an inbuilt stroppiness that won’t allow me to follow the crowd or to pander to algorithms. Social media based on photographs was never going to be an option. Nobody photographs me, even my better half, who thinks…
I’ve specialised in international data and its management for 30 years now, and everything I learn (which I still do daily) enforces the fact that the foundation anybody needs for successful international data management is knowledge. Knowledge, that is, of the world, its systems, conventions, languages, cultures and ways. Knowing how to code brilliantly is unhelpful unless you know what you need…
Yes, but Google ….. That’s the start of so many sentences that I hear and read, and the prologue to having to explain, over and over, that the mighty Google are as prone to errors and have to follow the same data paradigms as other companies. Google is very good at some of what it does. In other fields it is average or, if I dare blaspheme, it is poor. Yet Google is constantly being held up as the…
I received an e-mail the other day from one of the millions of “unaddressed” people of the world, living where there are no street names or building numbers. He lives in Ghana, and does have a postal code , a code which resolves to a GPS location so that Ghana Post can deliver to him. But that’s his problem – it’s only used currently by Ghana Post. He would like to order from companies outside…
Some people include a telephone number in their street address information in order to improve the chances of a package being delivered. In fact, some countries include a telephone number in their official address block format. But in a world where parcels are increasingly chucked over fences or launched from moving vehicles in order to achieve faster delivery times as margins become ever smaller,…
Normal 0 false false false EN-GB X-NONE X-NONE Regular readers know that I am not a fan of locational coding systems as a replacement for postal (humanly readable) addresses. I do not believe they can replace humanly readable addressing, and, despite a lot of hot air coming from various companies, I have yet to see a system in full working order. Take What3Words , for example. OK, so I know I seem…
The Irish Times took a look at the uptake of the Eircode six months on from its launch and concluded that uptake amongst the ordinary citizens of Ireland was sparse – about 2% according to one post office worker. Highly unscientific, but pretty interesting nonetheless. Would it be inappropriate if, at this point, I got up on my desk and jigged around, shouting “ I told you so !”? Take up of postal…
A blog post, in collaboration with PCAPredict , about how location codes, specifically Google’s, can be made more relevant to human users. January 2016. Read it here .
A blog post, in collaboration with PCAPredict , about the variety of telephone number formats worldwide and why validating them is so important. November 2015. Read it here .
A blog post, in collaboration with PCAPredict , about the variety of building numbering conventions around the world. October 2015. Read it here .
A blog post, in collaboration with PostcodeAnywhere , about the iminent launch of the Eircode location code in Ireland. July 2015. Read it here .
A blog post, in collaboration with PostcodeAnywhere , postulating that the explosion of various location coding services will not remove the need to have and maintain a postal address. March 2015. Read it here .
A blog post, in collaboration with PostcodeAnywhere , looking at how the world looks depends on where we are looking from. January 2015. Read it here .
A blog post, in collaboration with PostcodeAnywhere , looking at spooky place- and street names, to coincide with Hallowe’en. November 2014. Read it here .
A blog post, in collaboration with PostcodeAnywhere , discussing confusing program dialogues. November 2014. Read it here .
A blog post, in collaboration with PostcodeAnywhere , discussing the rules that form drop downs need to follow. October 2014. Read it here .
A blog post, in collaboration with PostcodeAnywhere , about data managers searching for hierarchies within their data which are not there. August 2014. Read more here .
When it comes to (postal/street) addresses there’s a figure that’s bandied about: 4 billion of the Earth’s inhabitants do not have a proper address. I don’t know where this figure comes from, but it’s everywhere. It’s one of those figures that has been repeated often enough to be accepted as fact and published and republished without further thought of checking. Here , for example. And here . And…
I was surprised to receive a package today (late ...) from a company in the UK which included in my address the province as NIERDEROSTERREICH (sic), a province of Austria, instead of NIEDERSACHSEN, the province of Germany where I live. There's no purpose to including a province in a German (or Austrian) address - I'm flummoxed as to why so many German websites ask for it - but the UK company…
A recent post by Daragh O Brien about the International Association for Information and Data Quality (I AIDQ) and its future got me thinking. I’ve never been deeply involved in the IAIDQ, unlike Daragh, but I was also a charter member, and I have experienced a definite change recently. Or, perhaps, experienced that I was no longer experiencing anything, if you get my drift. Many of the people I…
A recent blog post from a data quality company, which shall remain nameless, was in the form of a quiz. Could the reader spot the errors in the address formats from various countries? The idea was good – trying to get the reader to appreciate that these differ throughout the world, whereas most companies think they are the same for everybody. Unfortunately Sod’s Law intervened – the “corrected”…
I recently read an article in Database Marketing Magazine by Paul Kennedy about the myths and reality of data (online version here ). In it Kennedy suggests, and I paraphrase, that consumers would rather see offers and advertising online which is of relevance to them than generic advertisements, a point often made. Is this assertion true? I don’t have any figures which support or refute this, but…
A country may have a postal code, but is it used? Do people know there is a code system, and, if they do, what their code is? And when is it safe to make "postal code" a required field for forms for that country? Read more here .