The Application of Feature Manipulation Engine (FME) to Maintain Quality Control (QC) over Standardized Spatial Data

The Bureau of Land Management National Operations Center (NOC) harvests and maintains a plethora of spatial data from twelve administrative state offices that holds central importance to implementing strategic national initiatives. Standardization is a fundamental process that serves to resolve data anomalies and data conflicts. Exercising quality control over standardized data helps to improve data integrity and builds confidence when making critical business decisions. The ability to adopt and apply FME QC tools has vastly improved customer experience in working with standardized data and has contributed to promoting better data management practices at the state level. The NOC utilizes the FME Tester transformer to help assess the accuracy of the data in each of the attribute fields and delivers QC reports directly to the state offices that include comments describing the nature of the errors. The states join their data to the QC report via the standardized primary key (GlobalID), and perform the necessary adjustments to their data. The adjusted dataset is replicated and reconciled with the NOC’s version of that particular state’s data. These efforts expedite QC workflow at the NOC as well as the states and continue to help staff deliver quality assured spatial data to both internal and external customers.