Chapter 10 : Telecommunication

Chapter 10 : Telecommunication

Geographic Location Dimension

Let’s shift gears and presume that we’re now working for a phone company

with land lines tied to a specific physical location. In general, the telecommunications

industry has a very well-developed notion of location. The same

could be said for the utilities industry. Many of its dimensions contain a precise

geographic location as part of the attribute set. The location may be resolved to

a physical street, city, state, and ZIP code or even to a specific latitude and longitude.

Using our dimension role-playing technique, we imagine building a

single master location table where data is standardized once and then reused.

The location table could be part of the service line telephone number, equipment

inventory, network inventory (including poles and switch boxes), real

estate inventory, service location, dispatch location, right of way, and even customer

entities. Each row in the master location table is a specific point in space

that rolls up to every conceivable geographic grouping, such as census tracts

and counties. A location could roll up to multiple unique geographic groupings

simultaneously.