On the Role of Data Quality in Improving Web Information Value

Abstract

n today's information era, every day more and more information is generated and people, on the one hand, have advantages due the increasing support in decision processes and, on the other hand, are experiencing difficulties in the selection of the right data to use. That is, users may leverage on more data but at the same time they may not be able to fully value such data since they lack the necessary knowledge about their provenance and quality. The data quality research area provides quality assessment and improvement methods that can be a valuable support for users that have to deal with the complexity of Web content. In fact, such methods help users to identify the suitability of information for their purposes. Most of the methods and techniques proposed, however, address issues for structured data and/or for defined contexts. Clearly, they cannot be easily used on the Web, where data come from heterogeneous sources and the context of use is most of the times unknown. In this keynote, the need for new assessment techniques is highlighted together with the importance of tracking data provenance as well as the reputation and trustworthiness of the sources. In fact, it is well known that the increase of data volume often corresponds to an increase of value, but to maximize such value the data sources to be used have to carefully analyzed, selected and integrated depending on the specific context of use. The talk discusses the data quality dimensions necessary to analyze different Web data sources and provides a set of illustrative examples that show how to maximize the quality of gathered information.