During the meeting, the State Changers discussed the potential to associate two tables of data that were not initially linked. The context revolved around how to handle store and meal item data, with the aim to associate meal items with the stores they belong to. This problem arose because the association was not considered necessary during the initial stage of data collection.
In an attempt to solve this, the team explored the possibility of the meal ID containing encoded information about the store. For this, they used a tool named CyberChef to decode a base64 encoded meal ID data string. Unfortunately, the decoded string did not contain helpful information linking the meal items to their respective stores, suggesting that the IDs were random and not containing store-specific data. The conclusion of the meeting suggested that the most straightforward solution to this issue would be to create a new field that links the stores to the meal items. Despite not solving the problem within the meeting, the discussion provided a useful exploration of encoding, a tool like CyberChef, and the way to handle data associations in similar future scenarios.
(Source: State Change Office Hours 6/15 )
