This is Data Enrichment. Enrichment enhances existing records by adding useful information derived from internal or external sources. The original postal address remains intact, while geographic coordinates are appended to make the customer record more useful for location analysis, logistics, service coverage, route planning, or segmentation.
Enrichment differs from cleansing. Cleansing corrects or standardizes defective data; enrichment adds information that was not previously present. A process may perform both—for example, standardizing an address before passing it to a geocoding service.
External enrichment introduces governance and quality considerations. The organization should assess source reliability, licensing and permitted usage, refresh frequency, match confidence, geographical precision, lineage, and whether enrichment values should be treated as authoritative or derived.
Metadata should record that latitude and longitude were obtained from an external geocoding process rather than directly supplied by the customer. Quality metrics may measure match rate, confidence, completeness, or positional accuracy.
DAMA identifies Data Quality Management as including error detection, cleansing, and enrichment strategies, while Metadata Management supports understanding of lineage, definitions, and usage.
Reference Topics: DAMA-DMBOK2 Chapter 13 — Data Enrichment; Cleansing; Profiling; Metadata Lineage; External Data Sources.
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