Data Quality Assessment: Challenges and Opportunities

Data-oriented applications, their users, and even the law require data of high quality. Research has broken down the rather vague notion of data quality into various dimensions, such as accuracy, consistency, and reputation, to name but a few. To achieve the goal of high data quality, many tools and techniques exist to clean and otherwise improve data. Yet, systematic research on actually assessing data quality in all of its dimensions is largely absent, and with it the ability to gauge the success of any data cleaning effort. It is our vision to establish a systematic and comprehensive framework for the (numeric) assessment of data quality for a given dataset and its intended use. Such a framework must cover the various facets that influence data quality, as well as the many types of data quality dimensions. In particular, we identify five facets that serve as a foundation of data quality assessment. For each facet, we outline the challenges and opportunities that arise when trying to actually assign quality scores to data and create a data quality profile for it, along with a wide range of technologies needed for this purpose.