7 Quality of Data
7 Quality of Data
In the article, "Beyond Accuracy: What data quality means to data consumers,” Wang and Strong
present results of a survey conducted to understand data quality dimensions from the point of view of
people using data. Their starting assumption is that “data consumers have a much broader data
quality conceptualization than IS professionals realize”. In summarizing previous work on data
quality dimensions, they point out the limits of both an intuitive and the theoretical approach to data
quality; both focus on development characteristics rather than use characteristics of data.
Wang and Strong define Data Quality as “data that are fit for use by data consumers,” and they
define Data Quality Dimensions as “a set of data quality attributes that represent a single aspect
or construct of data quality”. To establish their dimensions, they first collected a set of 118 attributes
of data identified by consumers themselves. Next, they asked survey respondents to categorize the
characteristics and to rate their importance about data use. Wang and Strong performed factor
analysis on the results and re-surveyed to understand the association of dimensions with categories
of data quality.