Towards a Compositional Semantic Account of Data Quality Attributes

This paper addresses the fundamental question: what does it mean for data in a database to be of high quality? The authors motivate the discussion with examples, where traditional views on data quality are found to be unsatisfactory. The work is founded on the premise that data values are primarily linguistic signs that convey meaning from their producer to their user through senses and referents. In this setting, data quality issues arise when discrepancies occur during this communication. The authors sketch a theory of senses for individual values in a relational table based on its semantics expressed using some ontology. The authors use this to offer a compositional approach, where data quality is expressed in terms of a variety of primitive relationships among values.