Data Quality
For now this page is to discuss a proposal for a short project (4-7 months) looking at data quality approaches to collaborative online sources of information. This is something that could be an interesting fit for the geospatial strand of JISC funding call 15/10 on infrastructures for education and research.
Overview
- INSPIRE does not mandate quality standards but Joint Research Commission recognises that not to consider quality, is an oversight.
- The ISO standards regarding quality of geographic information are oriented towards quality assurance in the data production process
- This means a lack of focus on the value of data quality information from the end-user's perspective - what problems are we helping to solve by publishing data quality information?
- For example, OS Research has done extensive work on a "vernacular gazetteer" of shapes for social names, but data quality concerns prohibit its release, even for research.
- Geodata world has its domain specific problems, can benefit from looking at lighter weight /
differently conceived quality approaches from other domains.
- The aim should be to encourage and support the publication of more data of variable, knowably unknown quality.
- Quality currently looks like a niche issue. New developments in data sharing over the internet will raise priority for machine-reusable descriptions of data quality (distributed databases; multiple copies of the same resource unsynchronised, or variably edited; more collaborative mapping projects along lines of OSM and OpenAddresses; lossy or transient datastores; linked data pollution)
Fit for 15/10?
See the briefing paper on the JISC geospatial strand for more context - up to 9 months duration between Feb and Dec 2011.
- Briefing emphasises infrastructure development, re-use of tools and services, both those directly supported by JISC and others popular on the web
Themes
- Starting with Nothing
- Attestation
- Edit-time quality reporting
- ...