Get your data right... First Time Right!

In my blog I mostly talk about data quality tools like DataCleaner that are diagnostic and treating, rather than preventive. Such tools have a lot of merit and strengths, but for a total view on data quality it is crucial that you also include tools that are preventive of poor data ever entering your system. In this blog post I want to talk a bit about a project that I have been involved with at Human Inference which is just that - our First Time Right JavaScript solution.

The idea is that we provide a subscription-based JavaScript API where you can easily decorate any HTML contact form with a lot of rich features for on-the-fly verification, validation, auto correction and helpful features for automatic filling of derived fields.

For example, the API allows you to enter (or copy/paste) a full name, including titulation, salutation, initials and more - and get these items parsed and placed into corresponding fields on a detailed contact form. It will even automatically detect what the gender of the contact is, and apply this in gender fields. We have similar data entry aids for address input, email input, phone numbers and contact duplicate checking.

Take a look at the video below, which demonstrate most of the features:



Now this is quite exciting functionality, but this is also a technical blog, so I'll talk a bit about the technology involved.

We built the project based on Google Web Toolkit (GWT). GWT enables us to build a very rich application, entirely in JavaScript, so that it can be embedded on any website - no matter if it's PHP based, ASP.NET based, Java based or whatever. Of course we do have a server-side piece that the JavaScript communicates with, but that is all hosted at Human Inferences cloud platform. So in other words: The deployment of our First Time Right principle is a breeze!

Since AJAX applications require locality of the server that it is communicating with, we've had to overcome quite some issues to allow the JavaScript to be external from the deployment sites. This is crucial as we want upgrades and improvements to be performed on our premises, not at individual customer sites. This way we can really leverage the cloud- and subscription-based approach to data quality. Our solution to the locality problem has been the JSONP approach, which is an alternative protocol for implementing AJAX behaviour. JSONP is a rather clever construct where instead of issuing actual HTTP requests, you insert new <script> elements into the HTML DOM at runtime! This means that the browser will perform a new request simply because the <script> element refers a new JavaScript source. It's not "pretty" to tackle errorhandling and the asynchronicity that this approach brings on, but we've done a lot of work to get it right, and it works like a charm! I hope to share some of our design patterns later, to demonstrate how it works.

Another challenge was of security. Obviously you will want to make sure that the JavaScript is only available for subscribers. And only for the websites that they've subscribed to (because otherwise the JavaScript can simply be copied to another website). Our way around this resembles how for example Google manages their subscriptions to Google Maps and other subscription services, where you need a site-specific API key. Very clever.

A few optional features may require some local add-on deployment. In particular, deduplication requires us to know the contact data to use as the source for detecting if a new contact is a duplicate. Here we have two options: On-premise installation of the deduplication engine or hooking up with our cloud-based deduplication engine, which can be configured to sync with your datastores.

All in all I am quite enthusiastic about the FTR solution and the technology behind the solution. I also think that our FTR API is an example of a lightweight approach to implementing Data Quality, which complements DataCleaner very well. Both tools are extremely useful for ensuring a high level of data quality, and both tools are very intuitive and flexible in the way you can deploy them.