Thursday 25 August 2011

1Spatial announces the Radius Studio Accreditation Programme


After a few months of deliberation with my other consultant colleagues here at 1Spatial, I am pleased to announce the arrival of the Radius Studio Accreditation Programme.  Click here to view the webpage, where you can find full details of the programme and how to get involved.  During its inception I have spent many hours trying to work out the best way to implement some form of official recognition in the Radius Studio arena.  I have been asking myself questions such as:-

  • What levels of accreditation should there be?
  • How should it be decided / applied?
  • Why should somebody want to have it?
  • What is in it for a participant?
  • What is in it for 1Spatial?
  • How does it help a participant?
  • How does it help the participant’s organisation?

I hope to explore and answer these questions during this blog.

We have decided on two levels of accreditation; Practitioner and Professional, both are free to join and can be anyone from a student to a CEO.  Participants will need to gain a Practitioner accreditation before they can achieve Professional accreditation.  There was much deliberation on how a participant might gain accreditation, should it be by exam, or by practical examples?  We decided on practical examples. 

We took this route because we believe that with practical examples a participant will learn more about the data that their organisation holds and how that data fits into the organisation’s processes.  This, in turn, allows the participant to gain valuable information on the organisation’s processes, adding value for the participant and organisation alike. 

The achievement criteria for each level can be found here. By meeting the requirements for accreditation, a participant will learn about data validation and its role within business processes.  This will also help an organisation to understand the levels of quality in their data and improve that quality where applicable.  By applying the practical approach to accreditation we believe that all parties involved in the process will be happy.  It is not just taking an exam for examinations sake; you really need to know the organisation’s data and data quality level in order to achieve the necessary criteria.

I recently certified our latest Practitioner Lee Wells from Staffordshire County Council.  Lee has done some excellent work around address matching against the National Land and Property Gazetteer, click here to see my previous blog. We were able to build a case study around Lee’s work which can be found here. It was this case study that enabled Lee to gain his Accreditation.



Moving forward we hope that Practitioners and Professionals alike will join forces to improve the quality of the datasets worldwide by utilising their combined experience to produce ever more refined and exhaustive rule sets that can be applied across a multitude of data sources.

Watch this space for more developments!

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