BRERC’s aim is to provide key data users with access to the most up-to-date data, in the formats and system they need it.

Our vision is to maximise the value of BRERC data provision by seamless integration with a data users normal day-to-day work.

To achieve this aim we work together with users to understand how you need to use the data, and we need to understand the systems and constraints that you work under.

Frequency of Update

Our key users all have live access to the most up to date BRERC data via an online portal. This ensures key users have access to the up to date data, and can download and integrate that data into their systems as they see fit.

For some of our users, BRERC data is delivered annually, in line with the terms of the Service Agreement and their specific technical needs.

We would encourage all potential data agreement users to read the case study below and contact us to move towards a similar arrangement.

Case Study

The main data need from one of our data users was to have BRERC species data made available on the internal system of the in-house ecologist, alongside all the other non-BRERC data they needed to query as part of their job.

Workload was extremely high for this individual; as such, they required our species data to be broken down into five different categories, enabling them to quickly determine the most important species on any given site.

BRERC met with the in-house ecological team, plus the relevant I.T. staff, to discuss the mechanism for making the data available and the frequency of update.

The individual user fed their requirements back to BRERC, who were then able to construct SQL queries to extract the data to match those requirements. In liaison with the I.T. staff of the partner, access was granted to pull back BRERC species data direct from our web service. This is an automated service run by the partner organisation, which took place overnight at a frequency of once per month.

Updated data is automatically fed into the users system and made available to the individual in question in the format they required.

This system has now been running for over two years and is a great demonstration of how BRERC, the data user and their I.T. team can work together to produce an automated data delivery system that is time-efficient and delivers frequent data updates.