What is a “valid” email address?
We have recently spent a lot of time looking at data quality issues in publisher data. Email addresses are a key piece of contact info, and essential for online marketing campaigns, so it’s particularly important […]
Hierarchical searching
Anyone who works with customer records in scholarly publishing will know that a complicating factor can be the hierarchical relationships between individuals, departments, institutions and consortia. For a long time now it has been possible […]
Pulling rabbits from a hat: conjuring up missing info
One of the issues we often encounter with the files we receive from clients is that of incomplete data. When values are missing altogether, or are contained in the wrong fields, we have developed a […]
Data quality – A matter of life and death?
The subject of data quality and the fast and furious world of motor racing may seem worlds apart, yet as I watched a particularly exciting motorcycle race recently, it occurred to me just how vital […]
Customer data & the perspective problem
There’s an interesting issue we’ve noticed several times in recent months. It arises for publishers when departments want to access a broader set of customer data. That’s a great aim, but the way it’s raised […]
What makes a good user group?
We all know that making the most of third party software and services takes some effort. The more you put in, the more you get out. The last thing you want is for your expensive […]
MasterVision UK Publisher User Group
We recently held our UK publisher user group where representatives from many of our publishing clients had the opportunity to get together in Oxford and discuss issues related to using MasterVision within their organisations. The […]
Why AND and OR cause confusion
Like many online services, MasterVision lets users create searches which include ANDs and ORs. These terms are used in everyday English, and so it’s easy to assume that their meaning should be clear. But in practice, […]
The challenge of navigating large lists
In MasterVision it’s possible to run searches which return a very large number of results, with thousands or even millions of hits. This gives rise to an interesting challenge – how best to allow users to […]
Is your data getting “too old to trust”?
We recently announced a major new data quality module within our customer insight service MasterVision, and have since been having fun playing around with this new set of tools to see what we can discover. […]
The DataSalon Blog 