What kind of problems is QA Locate solving?
Helping clean up location-filled spreadsheets and databases, mostly of street addresses. And associating each cleaned-up street address to a specific building, and even to a sub-unit like an apartment or suite. Or taking a GPS coordinate and turning it into the closest street address (a.k.a. “reverse geocoding”).
For example, a marketing person gets a list of new leads from a vendor. They then need to “clean up” the leads before smashing them against the CRM and Billing systems to filter out only the leads which are new. The QA Locate tools enable easy translation of one location type (ex: GPS coordinate) to another location type (ex: Street Address, Building+Unit ID, Google PlusCode, etc.
What is the ULT?
The ULT (Universal Location Translator) enables the translation of one kind of location naming to another type. Think of it like “Google Language Translate”, except for locations; i.e. “Google Location Translate”. The idea is that you can give the ULT some location name (like a street address, a Lat+Long, Geohash, PlusCode, etc.) and it can do the work to translate it to another desirable form. Given the petabytes of location data coming out of the IoT devices, being able to make the location data useful for any sort of business intelligence is crucial for staying competitive. The ULT makes translating the location data, regardless of the type or source, trivial to whatever type is needed for the business case.