The GIS Lens 
Sanjay Gangal
Sanjay Gangal is the President of IBSystems, the parent company of AECCafe.com, MCADCafe, EDACafe.Com, GISCafe.Com, and ShareCG.Com. ScribeKey Releases GIS Data Profiler for Enhanced Data Description, Integration, and QA/QC WorkflowsJuly 17th, 2012 by Sanjay Gangal
Article source: ScribeKey ScribeKey, LLC, (www.scribekey.com) a Boston area GIS data integration company specializing in metadata and data cleansing, has released version 1 of the GIS Data Profiler. The profiler, an ESRI ™ArcGIS 9 or 10 add-on, captures information describing the structure, contents, and meaning of geospatial datasets. This information, which includes highly detailed, concise descriptions of feature classes, tables, data fields, value lists, indexes, metadata, geodatabase relationships, subtypes, domains, and more, is saved by default in an easy-to-use and share MS Access database. Profile information can also be saved to larger backend databases such as SQL Server or Oracle. The profiler can process Shapefile, Personal Geodatabase, File Geodatabase, SDE, and SDC datasets. Data profilers, typically found in enterprise business intelligence and decision support environments, are used to help with a wide variety of data-centric projects including dataset revision tracking, data QA/QC, application development, migration and conversion ETL, schema matching, metadata and data dictionary development, and more. Essentially, data profiling provides the ability to generate a highly structured and detailed table of contents and index for a database. Profiling makes it much easier to search through, become familiar with, and make the best use of even the largest data stores.  Profile Database Form Describing Feature Classes and Tables for US Census TIGER/Line Data
Brian Hebert, Solution Architect, and ScribeKey founder explains “We’re very pleased to be able to make this industrial strength data warehousing technology available to the geospatial community. Having a highly structured yet flexible metadata repository housed in a relational database opens up a whole new set of possibilities for GIS service firms, application developers, data brokers, data providers, and end users to do their jobs easier and faster. And we’ve tried to make it as easy as possible. It only takes a few minutes to install the application and get up and running with your first profile.” The profiler, developed with ArcObjects and .NET, uses a batch command line driven interface, with a wide variety of configurable settings. The profiler also contains a number of other useful tools. A clipping utility makes it very easy to use a set of polygons for generating much smaller and more manageable clipped out areas of very high volume, high layer-count datasets. An HTML table creator supports easy publication and sharing of data profile information using the look and feel of an organization’s web site, through the use of HTML templates. There are also tools for importing, flattening, exporting, and generating XML metadata, domain and regular expression matching utilities, and a Metalayer generator. Hebert explains: “Metalayers are polygon feature classes depicting the spatial extent or footprint of GIS datasets, as bounding boxes or convex hulls. These polygons can be easily joined with tables in the profile results database in ArcMap or other data viewing platforms. Having fully integrated data and metadata in the same data format, and available in the same GIS data delivery application, provides significantly enhanced data description, assessment, and search capabilities. It’s like having metadata on steroids.”  ScribeKey GIS Data Profiler Tools The profiler, which can also be used to capture information from any MS Access database, can also be used on non-geospatial, larger backend databases such as SQL Server and Oracle, through MS Access ODBC linking. A single user license of the profiler is priced at $395 USD, with site licensing available, and discounts for educational use. An evaluation version, along with a comprehensive tutorial using sample US Census Shapefile data, is available for download from www.scribekey.com. The HTML, XML, and Metalayer tools are fully functional in the evaluation version. The profiling and data clipping tools are limited to processing 10 feature classes or tables in the evaluation version, but still provide very useful functionality. About ScribeKey: ScribeKey provides data integration and metadata solutions for many IT platforms and environments. Brian Hebert, ScribeKey’s founder, has been designing and implementing database and GIS applications for both the public and private sectors in the U.S. and Europe, for over 30 years. Tags: GIS Data Profiler Category: ScribeKey One Response to “ScribeKey Releases GIS Data Profiler for Enhanced Data Description, Integration, and QA/QC Workflows” |
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At last, this is an app whose time has come. We were lucky to have been given given a preview of GIS Data Profiler by Mr. Hebert earlier in the summer, which was enough to secure our interest. We will continue to look to ScribeKey for more data linking applications of this type – with or without the steroids!