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)

Themes

• Starting with Nothing

• Attestation

• Edit-time quality reporting

• ...

Participants in this document / proposal

Jo Walsh