3-3 – Data Management – Data Migration

Data Migration 
The historical data for an environmental site can often shed light on current conditions and improve decision-making going forward. In environmental site analysis, it is pivotal to identify the source, timeline, and patterns of any potential site contamination. Knowing the historical characteristics of the environmental site(s) is just as important as knowing the current status of the site. In order to properly identify causes, improvements, or potential hazards, the site manager must be able to compare environmental site conditions over time.

The challenge is that historically, prior to the development and standardization of current environmental management standards, it was common for site owners and managers to only have site condition details in hardcopy format, or in customized data structures. Datasets were often un-structured and lacked the standardization that would allow efficient comparisons between datasets.

Resolving Data Structure and Format Disparities
Migrating historical data sources into a single common, standardized dataset resolves these disparities. Environmental Standards has performed numerous migrations over the past 30 years. Projects have ranged from thousands of records derived from the manual entry of hardcopy reports to millions of data records migrated from custom legacy systems. We work closely with the experts in our chemistry department to provide the seamless integration of historical data to be properly mapped to the new system in accordance with current and future project data capture. Together, we use our knowledge of data guidelines and structures, along with their expertise in chemistry standards, to perform an informed “P-E-T-L” process: Plan, Extract, Transform, Load.

Seeing the Big Picture
As an end-product, the client has a single, standardized, and cohesive source of information that they can use to analyze changes over time and create quick reports and graphs. The end result provides a complete picture of the chemical makeup of the client’s environmental site(s) over time.