The importance of data quality for Location Based Services (LBS).

'Data quality is fundamental and vital to us - there is no doubt about it. Every incorrect address, every route, every direction that is given incorrectly - every-time a user gets a bad experience – is a major impediment to buying into our overall proposition. In that respect data quality is fundamental to Location Based Services. '
Gareth Hardman, Navigation and Data Manager, 3.

Several factors make data accuracy particularly critical to Location Based Services(LBS). LBS customers invariably want to know where something is in order to assess how much physical effort it will take to reach it. A service that claims to help with such choices does not have to be legally accountable to suffer badly from an occasional mistake.

• A customer who walks 20 minutes in search of a non-existent cash-point will be annoyed.
• A customer that gets lost and runs out of petrol as a result of inaccurate data may well be angry enough to hold the service provider directly responsible.
• Unhappy customers tend to be vocal about such grievances.

The core component of a LBS service is a geo-coded map of the coverage zone. This is populated with content documenting local resources and synchronised with the location data provided by the user and / or their device.

Building accurate LBS is about the ability of the carrier to, first, match location data from the device to corresponding location data on the map and, second, match this location data to the data in the directories that populate the map with resources.

Mature LBS services will need more than one information provider, which often means integrating content from competing directory services that collect and store their information in different ways. These differences - addresses, street names, ‘freeform’ information – occur in the data layer. Making sure they are all correctly matched involves more than just setting up the right process and application logic to connect the systems.

Good data-matching tools are therefore essential to any customer facing service that relies on multiple partners. Such tools enable the service provider to independently assess the relative accuracy of data from multiple, competing elements, and have confidence in the quality of the service they deliver to their customer. They provide a cornerstone on which to base the future growth of the service.

If you would like to find out more please contact Pamela Cook by email: sales@infoshare-is.com or telephone the office on 020 8541 0111.