Chapter 13 – Data Enhancement

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses different ways to enhance data and provides some examples of the business process of data enhancement. Data enhancement is a process to add value to information by accumulating additional information about a base set of entities and then merging all the sets of information to provide a focused view of the data. There are two aspects to the business value of data enhancement. The first is that as organizational data environments mature and data managers want to exploit the corporate data asset, there is an increased necessity for sharing data from different groups; the disparate data sets represent different aspects of the same entities. The second aspect emerges from the actionable knowledge that can be discovered only by analyzing the results of composing multiple data sets. Through the accumulation of data from different sources, one can improve the overall quality of data, standardize it, and prepare it for further business intelligence (BI) applications, such as data mining. The value of data standardization lies in the notion that given the right base of reference information and a well-defined rule set, additional data can be added to a record in a purely automated way (with some exceptions).