Data management is the cornerstone of data-driven decision making. Before anyone can use your data, they have to be able to find and understand it. Ensuring your data is curated and optimized for use within your agency, by your constituents, and throughout state government is key to planning for change and providing services efficiently and effectively.
UGRC has been creating, accumulating, aggregating, transforming, and hosting data for over 30 years, so we know a thing or two about data curation and management. No matter where you are in the data life cycle, get in touch to explore how we can help you “spatialize” and manage your data better.
Build the foundation
Even if your data are not natively spatial, or you're not quite sure what spatial means, UGRC can help enrich your data by incorporating a locational component. Whether it's geocoding a list of addresses to see how they cluster together, aggregating and joining data to an existing boundary like counties or zip codes to display where a value is highest, or pulling in information from geographically-related datasets like census demographic data, you can use the power of location to gain new insights from your data.
Make it accessible and current
Efficient and effective government depends on distributing accurate data as widely as possible to help people make informed decisions. To do so, you may need to make your data available in a variety of formats and sources. Additionally, understanding how people use your data will inform how often you update these sources to keep it current and reliable. Our long history of data management has taught us many valuable lessons on how to keep data up to date and shared on multiple different platforms, and we are happy to pass along our knowledge and experience to your team, program, or agency.
Use our tools
Automating the processes that keep your data useful and available can be a real time saver. As an aggregator of data across the state, UGRC has lots of experience with automating the extract, transform, and load (ETL) process. We create our automation tools with the intent of sharing them with anyone that will benefit from them, and towards this end almost all our work is available in our GitHub organization , opens in a new tab under an open source license. You can try using one of our tools "off the shelf," or you can use it as a starting point for your own custom solution.
Participate in the SGID
Once your datasets are built, accessible, and current, consider contributing them to the State Geographic Information Datasource (SGID) for maximal exposure and usage. The SGID's goal is to make the most relevant and authoritative Utah spatial data available to the largest possible audience. Ideally, we can help people find the data you've already published by adding it to the SGID Index or the SGID on ArcGIS , opens in a new tab . But, if you don't have the capability to host the data yourself, we can help you publish it to the SGID directly.
