Uncertain rule based method for determining data currency

Abstract

Currency is one of the important measurements of data quality. The main purpose of the study on data currency is to determine whether a given data item is up-to-date. Though there are already several works on determining data currency, all the proposed methods have limitations. Some works require timestamps of data items that are not always available, and others are based on certain currency rules that can only decide relevant currency and cannot express uncertain semantics. To overcome the limitations of the previous methods, this paper introduces a new approach for determining data currency based on uncertain currency rules. First, a class of uncertain currency rules is provided to infer the possible valid time for a given data item, and then based on the rules, data currency is formally defined. After that, a polynomial time algorithm for evaluating data currency is given based on the uncertain currency rules. Using reallife data sets, the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method are experimentally verified.