AGIIS Annual Maintenance Calendar of Events

AGIIS Update

AGIIS Annual Maintenance Calendar of Events

By Chris Crutchfield, AgGateway Member Services

The Ag Industry Identification System (AGIIS) undergoes several maintenance activities beginning in December to help maintain the directory’s data quality and integrity. Below is a schedule of each of these activities, including significant changes from years past (in bold).

Historically, we run annual maintenance activities across two concurrent weekends in December. This year, we will apply Locatable Address Conversion System (LACS), National Change of Address (NCOA), Area Code Split, and City/State Review updates on Saturday, December 9, 2017. The annual de-duplication process, usually completed the weekend after annual maintenance, will not take place until February 16, 2018, allowing us to leverage a name standardization API within the annual de-duplication process that is currently in development. A communication will be sent to AGIIS subscribers one week ahead of each scheduled maintenance activity listed below.

  • December 1, 2017 - GLN Reuse Notification
  • February 9, 2018 - GLN Reuse Implementation
    Global Location Numbers (GLNs) that are inactive for four years are eligible to be reassigned to a new entity. Those GLNs that will be eligible for reuse will be made available for download from the AGIIS Directory on December 1, 2017. A communication will be sent to all subscribers when this list is made available. The file can be accessed by clicking on the FILES Menu, DOWNLOAD FILES, then clicking on the GLN REUSE HISTORY radio button. Subscribers should review this list against their internal systems and exempt any GLNs from reuse as necessary prior to February 9, 2018. This gives 49 business days to review the file and add exemptions. Exempting GLNs is done using the web interface by checking the GLN REUSE EXEMPTION check box. Please remember that exemptions expire after one year and will need to be re-exempted annually as needed.
  • December 9, 2017 - LACS/NCOA, Area Code Splits, City/State Review, Address Standardization
    • Locatable Address Conversion System (LACS) – LACS updates are made to rural route addresses, replacing them with a physical address.
    • National Change of Address (NCOA) – NCOA updates are applied to entities in AGIIS that have reported an address change to the U.S. Postal Service.
    • Area Code Splits – Updates are applied to phone numbers where an area code has changed.
    • City/State Review – Entities are reviewed to ensure the city and state validate with the postal code assigned.
    • Address Standardization Update – New this year to annual maintenance activities, addresses on AGIIS entities will be standardized.
  • February 16, 2018 – Annual De-Duplication
    The annual de-duplication process identifies duplicate entities in AGIIS and determines one surviving record based on a set of survivorship prioritization rules. This year, we will incorporate a name standardization API in the annual de-duplication process, that today is utilized on the web interface and in web services. Further development is needed to incorporate this API into the annual de-duplication process. Because development will not be completed before our annual maintenance activities in December, and the use of this functionality will provide incremental improvements in determining duplicates, the annual de-duplication process has been postponed until February 16, 2018.

If you have any questions regarding AGIIS annual maintenance activities, please contact Member Services at Member.Services@AgGateway.org or by phone, at (866) 251-8618.