Lately, it's been using SAS to publish information through the Web and has received an award for its Web work. EPA is an early tester of our software and provides good feedback. One of its headquarters is at Research Triangle Park, N.C., and we spend a great deal of time there helping with applications and receiving feedback. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. received an award last year for an application it wrote with SAS that helps analyze economic and financial data about insured institutions. Jon Wisnieski, the director of research and statistics, provides good feedback to SAS about software directions.
Data cleansing for a warehouse is a tough job.
The cleansing is unique to each application. The methodology we suggest is to take a backwards-in approach. Instead of cleansing first and then trying to figure out what kind of information to get out of it, we spend a lot of time figuring out the kind of information first, then going in and structuring the data. Too often, organizations take the opposite approach. They do data scrubbing to get rid of duplicate records, misspellings, different abbreviations for the same word and that sort of thing.