ideal Demographics Tool Overview
The ideal Demographics Tool (IDT) provides rich geographic information as a reusable, structured data component. The model is implemented as a set of Dabble DB objects under the Dabble Commons Licensing Model:
3 Categories
10 Views
10 Pages
Managing geographic data for business accounts seems easy on the surface, but subtleties abound. FDA Device Approvals, for example, provide demographic information about the Applicant's headquarters as follows:
City
State or Country Code - 2 Character field.
"ID" can be either "Idaho" or "Indonesia". Similarly, "CA" can be "Canada" or "California". To make matters more interesting, there is a city in California named "Ontario". The list goes on. Dabble provides a powerful way to enable service engineers to search for the most accurate demographic representation of the situations above and select the most appropriate match.
mindsong uses IDT to centrally manage, refine and publish this information into all mindsong-managed databases. This includes a Healthcare Practice for a Commercial Insurance Broker in California focused on 1,350 Skilled Nursing Facilities and the 250 Medical Management Companies that own them. Another healthcare example would be an integrated Clinical Trials Event database and the 12,000 healthcare services companies generating those events.
Originally, demographic categories were managed separately in each database with the classic break-fix-cycle being replicated across all databases. The recent introduction of Unique Keys by Dabble has made it possible to cleanly factor this information into a true-shared data component.
IDT also publishes this structured demographic data for use by any and all interested parties through Dabble DBs Commons Services at mindsongtools.dabbledb.com
Finally, IDT is a sample internet application showing how easy it is to create model-view-controller applications in the cloud with distributed workflow characteristics.
Architecture
The primary entity relationship tree is contained in a single Dabble-managed category of the form:
Kingdom (or Unions) : Nations
Nation : States (or Provinces)
State or Province : Cities
2ndary Tree - Counties
A secondary entity is employed to model State County information. This is done based both on semantic considerations (even when county information is useful, it is frequently not well known to users, so narrowing down a search-based field is quite tedious) as well as performance considerations (there are 3,110 counties in the United States alone).
County : Cities
Containers
Tree nodes of Designation
Kingdom or Union,
Nations,
State or Province
are container nodes for describing demographic data about Cities.
A separate field for Counties creates a secondary tree within the Geography category linking Cities to States. This provides rich modeling without cluttering the primary demographic relationship.
Leaves
Tree nodes of designation City are the primary demographic entities in the application.
Cities may be directly attached to States or Provinces, Countries or Kingdoms depending on the needs of the application. They may also be directly attached to Counties.
The goal of the IDT tool is to provide fine-grained demographic enclosures while making it easy for consumers to change the granularity depending on the needs of their application.
For example, the Insurance Brokerage sales team focuses currently on California and breaks the geography down by county. Ideal Clinical on the other hand is more global in scope with territories determined by states in a region.
Requests
IDT provides a distributed mechanism to manage demographic information over time. IDT allows anyone to establish requests at any level in the tree. Requests can describe corrections to existing entities or new entities. Requests can also be for a PREFIX to enable local additions for later MERGE back into the Tool-- Dabble's feature set makes building a true open source data application easy.
Publication Workflow
Requests are handled by a set of distributed administrators who create, correct, merge and publish entities.
Demographics Forum
IDT also provides a loosely-integrated forum for discussion and publishing of information through IDT.