Workflow Automation and Submission Control with 1Data Gateway

Automation is a key tool for increasing the efficiency of business processes, but implementing it can often be costly and more complicated than it first appears. This is not the case with the 1Spatial Platform – we’ve kept automation and simplicity at the heart of our product development. The latest releases of 1Integrate and 1Data Gateway allow for enhanced dashboard capabilities and enable further workflow automation.

The 1Data Gateway API has been extended to allow data to be submitted directly, without the user interface. This creates several new benefits:

• Streamlined Workflows: automated for submitting data
• Improved Dashboards: use metadata from submissions in your dashboards
• Increased Security: abstraction of User Management in 1Data Gateway, providing API keys per user

Streamlined Workflows

The ability to pass submissions via the API allows for seamless integration into wider automated workflows, as an alternative to manual data submission.

Additionally, the ability to pass metadata about each submission back into the rules engine as parameters allows for rules to be fine-tuned for particular purposes and suppliers.

An example of how this could be useful is if you are a data owner for a large national data set, receiving data submissions across several regions. You can now calibrate 1Integrate with a single session to be used across several regions, using the submission metadata as a parameter within your session to determine the applicable region. Fewer sessions and specifications means easier maintenance and lower setup costs.

Improved Dashboards

We have discussed the benefits of easy Dashboarding with 1Data Gateway here before but the extended API within 1Data Gateway now allows access to even more information upon which to report.

Products and processes that occur down-stream of data submission often need to know who provided updates and when. This information is maintained as submission metadata.

One such down-stream process might be a dashboard, in which it is useful to show how many updates users provide. You might also want to investigate in the case that there are proposed changes to review, who provided the data that caused the proposed change?

Another example of a down-stream product could be data publishing, in which a consumer is only interested in updates of a certain type from a certain group of contributors. Metadata can be used to easily filter and identify the required data.

Increased Security

The ability to separate submission metadata from the submitted data itself means you can report on statistics without disclosing any sensitive material.

This is in line with 1Spatial’s LMDM design principles, which encourage the simplification and minimisation of data handling, and the separation of concerns.

Providing unique API keys linked to user accounts also means you can control who has access to submit data via 1Data Gateway, and what information a particular user can retrieve through the API. There is no need to change any permission or access settings in other applications in the workflow, such as 1Integrate.

For more information visit the 1Spatial website