Data Quality: Theory and Practice

Real-life data are often dirty: inconsistent, inaccurate, incomplete, stale and duplicated. Dirty data have been a longstanding issue, and the prevalent use of Internet has been increasing the risks, in an unprecedented scale, of creating and propagating dirty data. Dirty data are reported to cost US industry billions of dollars each year. There is no reason to believe that the scale of the problem is any different in any other society that depends on information technology. With these comes the need for improving data quality, a topic as important as traditional data management tasks for coping with the quantity of the data.