Using ontologies providing domain knowledge for data quality management

Abstract

Several data quality management (DQM) tasks like duplicate detection or consistency checking depend on domain specific knowledge. Many DQM approaches have potential for bringing together domain knowledge and DQM metadata. We provide an approach which uses this knowledge modeled in ontologies instead of aquiring that knowledge by cost-intensive interviews with domain-experts. These ontologies can directly be annotated with DQM specific metadata. With our approach a synergy effect can be achieved when modeling a domain ontology, e.g. for defining a shared vocabulary for improved interoperability, and performing DQM. We present five DQM applications which directly use knowledge provided by domain ontologies. These applications use the ontology structure itself to provide correction suggestions for invalid data, identify duplicates, and to store data quality annotations at schema and instance level. © 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.