In the context of the course on document and records management, MaSTIC invites each year a vendor to present their software solutions. This year, IRIS will talk on Monday 11th of March at 6 pm specifically about the ways in which artificial intelligence tools have been embedded within their document management software. Also, they will expand on how they position themselves within this fast-evolving market.

Room: DC11.210 – eleventh floor of the D building, see the campus map to find your way on the campus – access by public transport with bus 71 or tram 94.
Registration: please register here.

For the second year, ULB organises a seminar to foster the exchange of best practices in regards to digital preservation and archiving in practice. Last year, KEEP Solutions (developer of RODA) and Artefactual (developer of Archivematica) offered an overview of the architecture and strategical development of their digital preservation tools. This year, on Monday 18th of March, presentations will give a high-level overview of the strategical challenges involved when implementing a preservation service. In the context of weKONEKT.brussels, we will welcome you at BOZAR. Please see below how to access the building (which will not be through the main entrance). We will start sharp on time, so please arrive 10 minutes early.

Program:

16h45: Opening of the room and informal networking
17h: Introduction by Seth van Hooland (ULB)
17h15: Preservica implementation and configuration at the Historical Archives of the EC by Sven Carnel and Lieven Baert (European Commission)
18h00: Development of an Archiving As A Service (AaaS) for the National Social Security Agency (ONNS) by Arnaud Hulstaert (SMALS)
18h30: Digital archiving policy at the National Archives Belgium by Sébastien Soyez (AGR)

Presentations will be in French but questions and discussion can take place in Dutch and English. No reservation required, there are enough available seats.

Accessibility: the event takes place at Bozar – please note that you need to enter NOT through the regular main entrance but through the entrance at rue Royal 10, 1000 Brussel (see image below). This door will be accessible starting from 16h30, giving you access to the room Errera + 1.

Téléchargez les slides d’Isabelle Boydens (1MB) et de Gani Hamiti (5MB).

Dans le cadre du cours STIC-B-510 « Qualité de l’information et des documents numériques » de la filière STIC de l’Université libre de Bruxelles, Gani Hamiti, Data Quality Analyst chez Smals, donnera un cours-conférence intitulé « Data Quality Tools : concepts and practical lessons from a vast operational environment ».

L’événement aura lieu le mercredi 13 mars 2019 de 18 heures à 20 heures à l’Université libre de Bruxelles (auditoire K.4.401, bâtiment K, campus du Solbosch). L’exposé sera suivi d’une séance de questions-réponses ainsi que d’une réception.

Celui-ci s’adresse à un public multidisciplinaire. Le cours-conférence abordera, d’une part, l’analyse critique et l’amélioration de la qualité des bases de données auxquelles peuvent être confrontés des utilisateurs non-informaticiens.  D’autre part, plusieurs fonctionnalités avancées des « data quality tools », parmi les plus élaborées à l’heure actuelle et parfois méconnues de la communauté IT, seront évoquées dans le cadre d’une approche rigoureuse reposant sur une expérience et des exemples concrets.

Le cours-conférence ainsi que l’orateur seront brièvement présentés par Isabelle Boydens, titulaire du cours STIC-B-510, Professeur à l’Université libre de Bruxelles et Data quality Expert au sein du Département « Recherche » de Smals.

Abstract

A common catchphrase thrown around in IT parties to instantly part the crowd like a human Red Sea is that “Data matures like wine, applications like fish”[efn_note] Initial analogy by James Governor, 2007 (https://redmonk.com/jgovernor/2007/04/05/why-applications-are-like-fish-and-data-is-like-wine/), exact wording commonly attributed to Andy Todd, 2009 (https://craigsmith.id.au/2009/12/21/osdc-2009-day-3-wrapup/). [/efn_note]. While feature creep and fast paced technical obsolescence may certainly represent challenges to an application’s long-term sustainability, one can easily forget that fine wine only ages better if it is kept in adequate conditions. Furthermore, over time, actual stagnation and non-usage tend to join the ranks of data’s worst enemies.

Facing the ever-growing volume and stakes of data and considerable variety of the problems that it is used to support solving, data quality tools have come to play a major role in helping users to get a better grasp of what is happening into their data as much as tackling the problems that they discover. Practically, they offer technical solutions focused on making the data « fitter » for its uses in a costs-vs-benefits approach. Such tools leverage multiple decades of refined algorithms, optimizations and knowledge bases to deal efficiently with a wide array of challenges, such as building, enforcing and measuring business rules, parsing and validating address or product data, or comparing and matching records of one or multiple databases, possibly from different core business activities.

During this evening, we will go over the most typical features of industry-grade data quality tools and how they can help us to address the aforementioned issues and many more, using examples, stats and facts drawn from a large-scale operational environment.

This presentation will not require prior familiarity with the technical side of data quality and its tools, although that may help grasping underlying challenges and deeper concepts. Furthermore, since this approach is mostly aimed at existing issues in living databases, it integrates very well with the methodological and structural data quality approaches taught at the STIC-B510 « Qualité de l’information et des documents numériques » course, working hand in hand with them.

Speaker

After graduating from the Master in Information and Communication Science and Technology (Université libre de Bruxelles), Gani Hamiti has been working in the data quality field at Smals.  In this regard, he has been involved in various empirical data migration projects and in widely generalizable application areas such as social fraud detection or accounting information systems integration. In parallel, a significant part of his work consists in spreading awareness and sharing knowledge about data quality.