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How AI driven tech consultancy firm Devoteam transformed the Irish Media Giant’s dataset with Amazon Web Services.
The Business Post Group stands as a cornerstone of Irish media, distinguished as the country’s only privately-owned national media company. With iconic brands like Irish Tatler and Food & Wine in its portfolio, the organisation has built its reputation on trusted, respected, and independent journalism through both organic growth and strategic acquisitions.
The company is embarking on an ambitious digital transformation journey, aiming to expand its digital-only news business from 10,000 to 40,000 subscribers. This modernisation strategy focuses on leveraging data and AI to drive digital growth and global expansion, accelerated by the evolving demands of on-demand news consumption and the opportunities presented by emerging technologies.
Business Post recently acquired a comprehensive dataset spanning property, business, and legal domains. While initially acquired to support their journalism, the organisation recognised these records could have broader applications across various industries.
To explore the potential of this dataset, Business Post decided to focus first on the property information, which presented a clear challenge and use case. The property records included an extensive collection of ‘Site Plans’ with addresses that predated a significant change in Ireland’s addressing system.
In 2015, Ireland introduced the Eircode system, assigning a unique identifier to every address in the country. This new standard created a need to update and align existing address data with the Eircode format to maintain relevance and usability.
Matching the pre-existing addresses in Business Post’s records to the new Eircode system presented several challenges which included inconsistent legacy addressing formats, difficulties tracking building modifications and out of date legal property information.
Therefore this lead to inefficient data searching with manual matching becoming both time-consuming and potentially error-prone
Business Post recognised that resolving these challenges could not only enhance their own use of the data but also potentially create opportunities in sectors such as real estate, finance, legal services, and market research. Their aim was to accurately match pre-Eircode ‘Site Plan’ data sets to modern Irish address standards (Eircodes),and hit a target match rate exceeding 70%.
Devoteam is an Amazon Web Services Premier Partner specialising in cloud migration, modernisation, and Generative AI. The company’s expertise in the AWS Well-Architected Framework ensures every solution they deliver follows established best practices.
The AI driven consultancy company Devoteam was brought in to create a robust, scalable solution and to transform legacy site plans into actionable insights using AWS services. They began by setting up a sandbox environment with the Anthropic Claude 3.5 Sonnet model to have a powerful AI engine to work with. Alongside this, Devoteam undertook extensive data refinement and normalisation, enriching the dataset with Irish Government open data to improve matching accuracy.
With clean data and a stable environment in place, the focus was on building the core solution by developing a sophisticated geo-matching algorithm for precise location identification, supported by a robust data processing pipeline.
The matching process worked in two stages. First, Devoteam utilised latitude and longitude coordinates from both property records and planning application polygons, implementing an interception method to identify potential matches. Secondly, for cases where multiple locations were identified, AI-driven analysis of satellite imagery and contextual planning data were employed to refine the results.
This dual approach accurately matched potential Eircodes by considering spatial relationships, satellite imagery, and contextual information within the planning application.
Rigorous testing was crucial for a solution handling sensitive property data and to confirm the system’s effectiveness, while thorough documentation ensured smooth knowledge transfer.
Devoteam’s solution architecture leveraged four key AWS services, AWS Lambda / Notebooks, AWS Bedrock, AWS Location and AWS S3.
The end result was a successful transformation of historical records into a modern, searchable resource for the proof-of-concept area of County Carlow. The system processed over 55,000 locations across 15,669 planning applications, achieving an outstanding 85% (exceeding the 70% target) match rate between historic Site Plans and modern Eircodes, paving the way for potential nationwide implementation.
The high success rate and robust handling of complex cases demonstrates the solution’s readiness for full-scale deployment across Business Post’s entire dataset.
The success of this proof of concept has laid the groundwork for Business Post’s broader digital transformation initiative. This solution provides a crucial foundation for enriched content delivery and new data services.
Building on these results, Business Post is now actively planning a comprehensive migration strategy through the AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP). The high match rates and sophisticated AI capabilities demonstrated in the POC validate Business Post’s vision of transforming from a traditional media company into a data-driven, digital-first organisation.
“The technical team at the Business Post Group has found real value in collaborating with Devoteam. Their structured approach brings a diverse range of strengths to the table, enabling us to address challenges and capitalize on opportunities with impressive speed and tangible results,” said Craig Tait, Group Technical & Data Director, Business Post Group. “When Devoteam came on board, they confidently tackled a complex proof-of-concept brief against a Google Partner who had already been working on it for weeks. Devoteam exceeded all expectations, delivering results far superior to the competition.”
