Multidimensional Contexts for Data Quality Assessment

Abstract

The notion of data quality cannot be separated from the context in which the data is produced or used. Recently, a conceptual framework for capturing context-dependent data quality assessment has been proposed. According to it, a database D is assessed wrt. a context which is modeled as an external system containing additional data, metadata, and definitions of quality predicates. The instance D is “put in context” via schema mappings; and after contextual processing of the data, a collection of alternative clean versions D′ of D is produced. The quality of D is measured in terms of its distance to this class. In this work we extend contexts for data quality assessment by including multidimensional data, which allows to analyze data from multiple perspectives and different degrees of granularity. It is possible to navigate through dimensional hierarchies in order to go for the data that is needed for quality assessment. More precisely, we introduce contextual hierarchies as components of contexts for data quality assessment. The resulting contexts are later represented as ontologies written in description logic.