Precision
| Characteristic Name: | Precision |
| Dimension: | Accuracy |
| Description: | Attribute values should be accurate as per linguistics and granularity |
| Granularity: | Element |
| Implementation Type: | Rule-based approach |
| Characteristic Type: | Declarative |
Verification Metric:
| The number of tasks failed or under performed due to lack of data precision |
| The number of complaints received due to lack of data precision |
GuidelinesExamplesDefinitons
The implementation guidelines are guidelines to follow in regard to the characteristic. The scenarios are examples of the implementation
| Guidelines: | Scenario: |
|---|---|
| Ensure the data values are correct to the right level of detail or granularity | (1) Price to the penny or weight to the nearest tenth of a gram. (2) precision of the values of an attribute according to some general-purpose IS-A ontology such as WordNet |
| Ensure that data is legitimate or valid according to some stable reference source like dictionary/thesaurus/code. | (1) Spellings and syntax of a description is correct as per the dictionary/thesaurus/Code (e.g. NYSIIS Code) (2) Address is consistent with global address book |
| Ensure that the user interfaces provide the precision required by the task | (1) if the domain is infinite (the rational numbers, for example), then no string format of finite length can represent all possible values. |
| Ensure the data values are lexically, syntactically and semantically correct | (1) “Germany is an African country” (semantically wrong); Book.title: ‘De la Mancha Don Quixote’ (syntactically wrong); UK’s Prime Minister: ‘Toni Blair’ (lexically wrong) |
Validation Metric:
| How mature is the creation and implementation of the DQ rules to maintain data precesion |
These are examples of how the characteristic might occur in a database.
| Example: | Source: |
|---|---|
| if v = Jack,even if v = John, v is considered syntactically correct, as Jack is an admissible value in the domain of persons’ names | C. Batini and M, Scannapieco, “Data Quality: Concepts, Methodologies, and Techniques”, Springer, 2006. |
The Definitions are examples of the characteristic that appear in the sources provided.
| Definition: | Source: |
|---|---|
| Data values are correct to the right level of detail or granularity, such as price to the penny or weight to the nearest tenth of a gram. | ENGLISH, L. P. 2009. Information quality applied: Best practices for improving business information, processes and systems, Wiley Publishing. |
| Data is correct if it conveys a lexically, syntactically and semantically correct statement – e.g.,the following pieces of information are not correct:“Germany is an African country” (semantically wrong);Book.title: ‘De la Mancha Don Quixote’ (syntactically wrong); UK’s Prime Minister: ‘Toni Blair’ (lexically wrong). | KIMBALL, R. & CASERTA, J. 2004. The data warehouse ETL toolkit: practical techniques for extracting. Cleaning, Conforming, and Delivering, Digitized Format, originally published. |
| The set S should be sufficiently precise to distinguish among elements in the domain that must be distinguished by users. This dimension makes clear why icons and colors are of limited use when domains are large. But problems can and do arise for the other formats as well, because many formats are not one-to-one functions. For example, if the domain is infinite (the rational numbers, for example), then no string format of finite length can represent all possible values. The trick is to provide the precision to meet user needs. | LOSHIN, D. 2001. Enterprise knowledge management: The data quality approach, Morgan Kaufmann Pub. |
| Is the information to the point, void of unnecessary elements? | LOSHIN, D. 2006. Monitoring Data quality Performance using Data Quality Metrics. Informatica Corporation. |
| The degree of precision of the presentation of an attribute’s value should reasonably match the degree of precision of the value being displayed. The user should be able to see any value the attributer may take and also be able to distinguish different values. | REDMAN, T. C. 1997. Data quality for the information age, Artech House, Inc. |
| The granularity or precision of the model or content values of an information object according to some general-purpose IS-A ontology such as WordNet. | STVILIA, B., GASSER, L., TWIDALE, M. B. & SMITH, L. C. 2007. A framework for information quality assessment. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 58, 1720-1733. |
Completeness of records
| Characteristic Name: | Completeness of records |
| Dimension: | Completeness |
| Description: | Every real world entity instance, that is relevant for the organization can be found in the data |
| Granularity: | Record |
| Implementation Type: | Process-based approach |
| Characteristic Type: | Usage |
Verification Metric:
| The number of tasks failed or under performed due to missing records |
| The number of complaints received due to missing records |
GuidelinesExamplesDefinitons
The implementation guidelines are guidelines to follow in regard to the characteristic. The scenarios are examples of the implementation
| Guidelines: | Scenario: |
|---|---|
| Implement a process level validation mechanism to avoid occurrence of missing records | (1) A buyer must record/verify an expense or asset in accordance with accepting/receiving any purchased items. (2)New application are stored in a temporary cabinet after entering into the system and they will be transferred to the file cabinet at the end of every week after the property manager cross check them with the system |
| Execute database commits upon transaction sequences in application programs and make sure all the transactions in the sequence successfully commit and generate the required records at the end of the sequence. | (1) In generating the MRP, the database operations will not be committed unless all materials in BOM is successfully executed for MRP |
| When distributed databases are used or online data collection devices are used, ensure the synchronisation/replication of records happen successfully without distortions and omissions. | (1) EFTPOS transactions are replicated with bank database and create the new balance B/F in the account |
| Implement periodic audit process for critical tangible objects that are recorded as data in database | (1) Annual audit for tangible assets in the organisation |
| Implement a validation mechanism in data transfers considering the business rules to monitor and ensure all records relevant to a event/transaction is transferred successfully. | (1) Rules to verify the number of records in the source file and destination file (2) All records relevant to a customer trip is transferred to the central database from online data stores |
| Maintain error logs for system transactions and regularly monitor them and perform relevant forensic activities to find missing records. | (1) A failed sales order creation |
Validation Metric:
| How mature is the process to prevent missing records |
These are examples of how the characteristic might occur in a database.
| Example: | Source: |
|---|---|
| if Dept is a relation representing the employees of a given department, and one specific employee of the department is not represented as a tuple of Dept, then the tuple corresponding to the missing employee is in ref(Dept),and ref(Dept) differs from Dept in exactly that tuple. | C. Batini and M, Scannapieco, “Data Quality: Concepts, Methodologies, and Techniques”, Springer, 2006. |
| if a column should contain at least one occurrence of all 50 states, but the column contains only 43 states, then the population is incomplete. | Y. Lee, et al., “Journey to Data Quality”, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2006. |
| the database should contain all customers in North and South America, but it is known that the database reflects only a portion of the company’s customers. Coverage in this example is the percent- age of customers actually captured in the database compared to the population of all customers that should be in it. | D. McGilvray, “Executing Data Quality Projects: Ten Steps to Quality Data and Trusted Information”, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, 2008. |
The Definitions are examples of the characteristic that appear in the sources provided.
| Definition: | Source: |
|---|---|
| A record exists for every Real-World Object or Event the Enterprise needs to know about. | ENGLISH, L. P. 2009. Information quality applied: Best practices for improving business information, processes and systems, Wiley Publishing. |
| Completeness of data refers to the extent to which the data collected matches the data set that was developed to describe a specific entity. Monitoring for incomplete lists of eligible records or missing data items will identify data quality problems. | HIQA 2011. International Review of Data Quality Health Information and Quality Authority (HIQA), Ireland. http://www.hiqa.ie/press-release/2011-04-28-international-review-data-quality. |
| Quality of having all data that existed in the possession of the sender at time the data message was created. | ISO 2012. ISO 8000-2 Data Quality-Part 2-Vocabulary. ISO. |
| Data is complete if no piece of information is missing – anti-example: "The Beatles were John Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr" | KIMBALL, R. & CASERTA, J. 2004. The data warehouse ETL toolkit: practical techniques for extracting. Cleaning, Conforming, and Delivering, Digitized Format, originally published. |
| Every real-world phenomenon is represented. | PRICE, R. J. & SHANKS, G. Empirical refinement of a semiotic information quality framework. System Sciences, 2005. HICSS'05. Proceedings of the 38th Annual Hawaii International Conference on, 2005. IEEE, 216a-216a. |