Data Quality

Motivation: To promote a systems biology approach to understanding the biological effects of environmental stressors, the Chemical Effects in Biological Systems (CEBS) knowledge base is being developed to house data from multiple complex data streams in a systems friendly manner that will accommodate extensive querying from users. Unified data representation via a single object model will greatly aid in integrating data storage and management, and facilitate reuse of software to analyze and display data resulting from diverse differential expression or differential profile technologies. Data streams include, but are not limited to, gene expression analysis (transcriptomics), protein expression and protein-protein interaction analysis (proteomics) and changes in low molecular weight metabolite levels (metabolomics). Results: To enable the integration of microarray gene expression, proteomics and metabolomics data in the CEBS system, we designed an object model, Systems Biology Object Model (SysBio-OM). The model is comprehensive and leverages other open source efforts, namely the Micro-Array Gene Expression Object Model (MAGE-OM) and the Proteomics Experiment Data Repository (PEDRo) object model. SysBio-OM is designed by extending MAGE-OM to represent protein expression data elements (including those from PEDRo), protein-protein interaction and metabolomics data. SysBio-OM promotes the standardization of data representation and data quality by facilitating the capture of the minimum annotation required for an experiment. Such standardization refines the accuracy of data mining and interpretation. The * To whom correspondence should be addressed. † The authors wish it to be known that, in their opinion, these two authors should be regarded as joint First Authors. open source SysBio-OM model, which can be implemented on varied computing platforms is presented here. Availability: A universal modeling language depiction of the entire SysBio-OM is available at http://cebs.niehs.nih.gov/ SysBioOM/. The Rational Rose object model package is distributed under an open source license that permits unrestricted academic and commercial use and is available at http://cebs.niehs.nih.gov/cebsdownloads. The database and interface are being built to implement the model and will be available for public use at http://cebs.niehs.nih.gov.

Data are considered to be important organizational assets because of their assumed value, including their potential to improve the organizational decision-making processes. Such potential value, however, comes with various costs, including those of acquiring, storing, securing and maintaining the given assets at appropriate quality levels. Clearly, if these costs outweigh the value that results from using the data, it would be counterproductive to acquire, store, secure and maintain the data. Thus cost-benefit assessment is particularly important in data warehouse (DW) development; yet very few techniques are available for determining the value that the organization will derive from storing a particular data table and hence determining which data set should be loaded in the DW. This research seeks to address the issue of identifying the set of data with the potential for producing the greatest net value for the organization by offering a model that can be used to perform a cost-benefit analysis on the decision support views that the warehouse can support and by providing techniques for estimating the parameters necessary for this model.

Airborne laser scanning is a fast, cost-effective technique for the acquisition of 2.5D data, mainly for use in topographic and mapping operations. In recent years, however, the range of applications in which laser scanning can be used has greatly broadened and this has made higher data quality a necessity.

Cancer registration data plays a major role in the design and monitoring of cancer control activities and policies, and population-based cancer registries (PBCR) are the main source of information. In developed countries, the healthcare infrastructure enables the registration of quality cancer data. In low and middle Income countries (LMIC), where health care facilities are limited or scarce, cancer registration data may be of low quality. The aim of this article is to demonstrate the value of cancer incidence data for LMIC, even when quality is questionable, as well as to attempt to interpret the messages that the quality indicators convey both for cancer registration and the healthcare system. The study of data submitted to the Cancer incidence in five continents, volume nine (CI5-IX) leads to the conclusion that when PBCR from LMIC cannot provide good quality data it may indicate a deficiency that goes above and beyond the registrar ability. The quality control indicators evaluated provide insight on local conditions for cancer diagnosis and care. Low data quality not only signals lack of collaboration among reporting sources and the inability of the registrar to perform quality abstracting, but also points to specific weaknesses of the cancer care system and can guide improvement goals and efforts.

Estimating the amount of gas-hydrate and freegas is difficult in deep seas even with scientific coring and downhole measurements. Well data may be incompatible between holes of a site as well as with depth in the same hole. In this paper, we demonstrate an approach to estimate saturation of gas-hydrate from seismic velocities at any site where data set is limited. The study is carried out in the outer Blake Ridge, which is one of the most intensively studied regions of natural gas-hydrate occurrences and a very distinctive example of studying geophysical signatures of gas-hydrate and free-gas in deep marine sediments. Although, downhole measurements from both vertical seismic profiles (VSPs) and sonic logs provide the most accurate and direct measurements of velocity, only VSP velocities at Ocean Drilling Program (ODP) Sites 994, 995, and 997 on the Blake Ridge are used to estimate the saturation of gas-hydrate and free-gas as sonic logs at ODP sites are not reliable. Here we derive a general trend of the background velocity with depth using the porosity and mineralogy from coring at discrete depth intervals. Saturations of gas-hydrate and free-gas are then estimated from this background velocity using the effective medium modeling. The porosity and mineralogical compositions are taken from four different depths at Site 995, as data quality is the best in this hole. Average saturations of gas-hydrate and free-gas at three holes are estimated as 10-14 and 2-3%, respectively.

Background Health records are essential for good health care. Their quality depends on accurate and prompt documentation of the care provided and regular analysis of content. This study assessed the quantitative properties of inpatient health records at the Federal Medical Centre, Bida, Nigeria. Method A retrospective study was carried out to assess the documentation of 780 paper-based health records of inpatients discharged in 2009. Results 732 patient records were reviewed from the departments of obstetrics (45.90%), pediatrics (24.32%), and other specialties (29.78%). Documentation performance was very good (98.49%) for promptness recording care within the first 24 h of admission, fair (58.80%) for proper entry of patient unit number (unique identifier), and very poor (12.84%) for utilization of discharge summary forms. Overall, surgery records were nearly always (100%) prompt regarding care documentation, obstetrics records were consistent (80.65%) in entering patients' names in notes, and the principal diagnosis was properly documented in all (100%) completed discharge summary forms in medicine. 454 (62.02%) folders were chronologically arranged, 456 (62.29%) were properly held together with file tags, and most (80.60%) discharged folders reviewed, analyzed and appropriate code numbers were assigned. Conclusions Inadequacies were found in clinical documentation, especially gross underutilization of discharge summary forms. However, some forms were properly documented, suggesting that hospital healthcare providers possess the necessary skills for quality clinical documentation but lack the will. There is a need to institute a clinical documentation improvement program and promote quality clinical documentation among staff.

OpenStreetMap (OSM) is a free map of the world which can be edited by global volunteers. Existing studies have showed that completeness of OSM road data in some developing countries (e.g. China) is much lower, resulting in concern in utilizing the data in various applications. But very few have focused on investigating what types of road are still poorly mapped. This study aims not only to investigate the completeness of OSM road datasets in China but also to investigate what types of road (called omission roads) have not been mapped, which is achieved by referring to both Street Map and Street View. Sixteen prefecture-level divisions in the urban areas of Hubei (China) were used as study areas. Results showed that: (1) the completeness for most prefecture-level divisions was at a low-to-medium level; most roads (in the Street Map), however, with traffic conditions had already been mapped well. (2) Most of the omission OSM roads were either private roads, or public roads not having yet been named and with only one single lane, indicating their minor importance in the urban road network. We argue that although the OSM road datasets in China are incomplete, they may still be used for several applications such as traffic flow analysis, road map representation, and backbone structure detection.

Introduction The change in light intensity that takes place when an ambient air sample is drawn into the detection chamber of a chemiluminescence monitor generates changes in the concentrations of several species, such as NO 2 , NO and O 3 . Although this phenomenon has been known for several decades, there is still no commonly accepted approach on when or how to correct for it in NO 2 and O 3 readings. Discussion In this work, we have assessed the expanded uncertainty of two chemiluminescence NO x analysers commercially available according to EN 14211:2005, with the aim of establishing the maximum allowable standard uncertainty due to the reaction between NO and O 3 in the sampling system.

With the technological advancement in body area sensor networks (BASNs), low cost high quality electrocardiographic (ECG) diagnosis systems have become important equipment for healthcare service providers. However, energy consumption and data security with ECG systems in BASNs are still two major challenges to tackle. In this study, we investigate the properties of compressed ECG data for energy saving as an effort to devise a selective encryption mechanism and a two-rate unequal error protection (UEP) scheme. The proposed selective encryption mechanism provides a simple and yet effective security solution for an ECG sensor-based communication platform, where only one percent of data is encrypted without compromising ECG data security. This part of the encrypted data is essential to ECG data quality due to its unequally important contribution to distortion reduction. The two-rate UEP scheme achieves a significant additional energy saving due to its unequal investment of communication energy to the outcomes of the selective encryption, and thus, it maintains a high ECG data transmission quality. Our results show the improvements in communication energy saving of about 40%, and demonstrate a higher transmission quality and security measured in terms of wavelet-based weighted percent root-mean-squared difference.

Web archives preserve the history of born-digital content and oer great potential for sociologists, business analysts, and legal experts on intellectual property and compliance issues. Data quality is crucial for these purposes. Ideally, crawlers should gather sharp captures of entire Web sites, but the politeness etiquette and completeness requirement mandate very slow, long-duration crawling while Web sites undergo changes. This

Systematic methods for improving response rates in surveys has been an area of interest for researchers for some time following the articulation of the Total Design Method (Dillman 1978) which included applying aspects of social influence and social exchange theory to encourage responses. One part of the literature focused on the idea of offering a tangible but token incentive to respondents at the time of the request for data. Subsequent research and experience has shown that appropriate incentives do improve respondent cooperation in terms of obtaining better response rates (eg Singer and Wilmot 1997; Yammarino, Skinner and Childers 1991). The focus of most work has been on using monetary or token material incentives for surveys of individuals, so little is known about the problem of how to motivate businesses and the individuals in them to respond. The situation of National Statistical Organisations (NSOs) conducting surveys of businesses is also different to that of many other s...

Under circumstances where data quality may vary (due t o inaccuracies or lack of timeliness, for example), knowledge about the potential performance of alternate predictive models can help a decision maker t o design a business value-maximizing information system. This paper examines a realworld example from the field of finance t o illustrate a comparison of alternative modeling tools. T w o modeling alternatives are used in this example: regression analysis and neural network analysis. There are t w o main results: (1) Linear regression outperformed neural nets in terms of forecasting accuracy, but the opposite was true when w e considered the business value of the forecast. (2) Neural netbased forecasts tended t o be more robust than linear regression forecasts as data accuracy degraded. Managerial implications for financial risk management of MBS portfolios are drawn from the results.

A. Abraham el al.(Eels.) 251 Soft Computing Systems: Design, Management and Applications IOS Press. 2002 A Study of i^-Nearest Neighbour as an Imputation Method Gustavo EAPA Batista and Maria Carolina Monard University of Sao Paulo-USP Institute of Mathematics and ...

On-site laboratory evaluations, a key element of the laboratory approval process, encourage the proper implementation of analytical methods and provide supporting documentation to demonstrate method performance. These evaluations, regardless of their complexity, usually do not focus on identifying the key, explicit QA program activities that may in fact adversely affect the production of acceptable level data quality. They emphasize secondary elements of a QA system or program, such as, the organization, facilities, equipment, good laboratory practices, record keeping habits, and performance in the external intercomparison studies.

Recent developments in ecological statistics have reached behavioral ecology, and an increasing number of studies now apply analytical tools that incorporate alternatives to the conventional null hypothesis testing based on significance levels. However, these approaches continue to receive mixed support in our field. Because our statistical choices can influence research design and the interpretation of data, there is a compelling

The most important component needed in realizing a sustainable land development is a parcel-based data which acquired from the cadastral records. These data define not only size, shape, location, value of the real estate but also land-related rights, restrictions and responsibilities. While cadastre provides a guarantee and protects landowner's rights in many countries, it is also used for new land policy aims. Therefore, cadastre plays an important role on states in order to develop and supply new services such as spatial-based information systems in urban areas. Urban Information Systems (UIS) can be considered as an implementation of GIS in urban extent. It is an effective tool for local authorities with respect to manage urban relevant data and well-qualified service offer. Many geospatial data should be examined at the same time in UIS because of land planning, development and other decision-making procedures. However, land parcel-based information is very significant within this entire management task. From land taxation to environmental works in urban areas, cadastral documents are the main references which are always needed for a meaningful decision-making. Because cadastre is a methodically arranged public inventory of data concerning properties within a certain area, up-to-date cadastral data should be available for any time. If such data is in a digital form then it could be more valuable for an UIS application. But, the availability of cadastral data is also depending on the existing institutional structure and data use policy of a certain country as well. In this paper, firstly, the role of cadastral data in urban information procedures will be emphasized, and then the data quality and legal issues of introducing cadastral data to UIS applications of Turkey will be examined with regard to an organizational perspective. TS21

To assist risk assessors at the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site (SRS), a Geographic Information System (GIS) application was developed to provide relevant information about specific receptor species of resident wildlife that can be used for ecological risk assessment. Information was obtained from an extensive literature review of publications and reports on vertebrate- and contaminant- related research since 1954

The Web of Linked Data grows rapidly and already contains data originating from hundreds of data sources. The quality of data from those sources is very diverse, as values may be out of date, incomplete or incorrect. Moreover, data sources may provide conflicting values for a single real-world object. In order for Linked Data applications to consume data from this global data space in an integrated fashion, a number of challenges have to be overcome. One of these challenges is to rate and to integrate data based on their quality. However, quality is a very subjective matter, and finding a canonic judgement that is suitable for each and every task is not feasible. To simplify the task of consuming high-quality data, we present Sieve, a framework for flexibly expressing quality assessment methods as well as fusion methods. Sieve is integrated into the Linked Data Integration Framework (LDIF), which handles Data Access, Schema Mapping and Identity Resolution, all crucial preliminaries for quality assessment and fusion. We demonstrate Sieve in a data integration scenario importing data from the English and Portuguese versions of DBpedia, and discuss how we increase completeness, conciseness and consistency through the use of our framework.

Micro-incentives represent a new but little-studied trend in participant compensation for user studies. In this paper, we use a combination of statistical analysis and models from labor economics to evaluate three canonical micro-payment schemes in the context of high-burden user studies, where participants wear sensors for extended durations. We look at how these strategies affect compliance, data quality, and retention, and show that when used carefully, micro-payments can be highly beneficial. We find that data quality is ...

Metadados geográficos são um conjunto de informações que descrevem os dados geográficos. Os arquivos de metadados são utilizados para a identificação da informação geográfica, sua distribuição e auxilio na avaliação de sua qualidade. O presente trabalho compara o padrão de metadados geográficos ISO 19115:2003 (International Organization of Standards) com o padrão do Comitê Americano de Informação Geográfica (FGDC), padrões amplamente utilizados para a elaboração de metadados geográficos. São exemplificados o uso dos padrões e a implementação de metadados. No Brasil não existe um padrão pré-determinado para os metadados geográficos, dificultando a interoperacionalidade entre diferentes Sistemas de Informação Geográfica (SIG). A adoção de um padrão facilitaria o processo de conversão de dados espaciais entre diferentes bases e entre diferentes formatos.

In this paper, we address two specific areas: (a) how economic theory could provide a sound foundation to information quality (IQ) costing and (b) the extent both failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA) and service quality (SQ) literature could provide an empirical framework for estimating IQ cost curves. A case study of how risk tends to impact problem ticket requests (PTRs) and system change requests (SCRs) costing is show-cased. The empirical results show that the potential risks cannot be overlooked in so far as costing software maintenance projects.

Throughout the Federal Government, including the Department of Defense (DoD), there is a pervasive need to have current, reliable, and trusted data from what are termed Authoritative Data Sources (ADSs). This requirement has grown increasingly important as the military transforms. The transformation requires individual organizations, each using an array of independently developed stovepipe systems, to function on the battlefield with other weapons systems, services, and friendly nations, sharing communications networks and data. To ensure the accuracy of the data being provided by ADSs, new methodologies and metrics must be initiated. This paper proposes adoption of an Authoritative Data Source (ADS) Framework to analyze and adjudicate information quality issues prior to publishing data for consumer use and an ADS Maturity Model to rate data providers.

Nowadays, activities and decisions making in an organization is based on data and information obtained from data analysis, which provides various services for constructing reliable and accurate process. As data are significant resources in all organizations the quality of data is critical for managers and operating processes to identify related performance issues. Moreover, high quality data can increase opportunity for achieving top services in an organization. However, identifying various aspects of data quality from definition, dimensions, types, strategies, techniques are essential to equip methods and processes for improving data. This paper focuses on systematic review of data quality dimensions in order to use at proposed framework which combining data mining and statistical techniques to measure dependencies among dimensions and illustrate how extracting knowledge can increase process quality.

Lakes are excellent repositories of air-borne and especially stream-borne materials. It has long been recognised that lake sediments contain a strong record of catchment soils via the inputs of minerogenic and chemical erosional products. To these may be added a variety of palaeoecological indicators including pollen, fungi, Sphagnum leaves and faunal remains. Pollen analysis, in particular, enables land use change to be assessed over many millennia and demonstrates the landscape impacts of woodland clearance, grazing and crop cultivation. Radiocarbon dating provides a chronology for environmental and agricultural change and acts as an indicator of erosion in its own right. The use of such indicators to reconstruct past instances and patterns of erosion is demonstrated with reference mainly to 50 British and Irish lake sites and especially those which have produced signals of erosion in the form of accelerated sediment accumulation and inversed or reversed sequences of radiocarbon dates during the mid and late Holocene.

In many real-world applications, unimodal biometric systems often face significant limitations due to sensitivity to noise, intraclass variability, data quality, nonuniversality, and other factors. Attempting to improve the performance of individual matchers in such situations may not prove to be highly effective. Multibiometric systems seek to alleviate some of these problems by providing multiple pieces of evidence of the same identity. These systems help achieve an increase in performance that may not be possible using a single-biometric indicator. This paper presents an effective fusion scheme that combines information presented by multiple domain experts based on the rank-level fusion integration method. The developed multimodal biometric system possesses a number of unique qualities, starting from utilizing principal component analysis and Fisher's linear discriminant methods for individual matchers (face, ear, and signature) identity authentication and utilizing the novel rank-level fusion method in order to consolidate the results obtained from different biometric matchers. The ranks of individual matchers are combined using the highest rank, Borda count, and logistic regression approaches. The results indicate that fusion of individual modalities can improve the overall performance of the biometric system, even in the presence of low quality data. Insights on multibiometric design using rank-level fusion and its performance on a variety of biometric databases are discussed in the concluding section.

The topic of data integration from external data sources or independent IT-systems has received increasing attention recently in IT departments as well as at management level, in particular concerning data integration in federated database systems. An example of the latter are commercial research information systems (RIS), which regularly import, cleanse, transform and prepare the analysis research information of the institutions of a variety of databases. In addition, all these so-called steps must be provided in a secured quality. As several internal and external data sources are loaded for integration into the RIS, ensuring information quality is becoming increasingly challenging for the research institutions. Before the research information is transferred to a RIS, it must be checked and cleaned up. An important factor for successful or competent data integration is therefore always the data quality. The removal of data errors (such as duplicates and harmonization of the data structure, inconsistent data and outdated data, etc.) are essential tasks of data integration using extract, transform, and load (ETL) processes. Data is extracted from the source systems, transformed and loaded into the RIS. At this point conflicts between different data sources are controlled and solved, as well as data quality issues during data integration are eliminated. Against this background, our paper presents the process of data transformation in the context of RIS which gains an overview of the quality of research information in an institution's internal and external data sources during its integration into RIS. In addition, the question of how to control and improve the quality issues during the integration process in RIS will be addressed.

Imbalanced data is a common problem in data mining when dealing with classification problems, where samples of a class vastly outnumber other classes. In this situation, many data mining algorithms generate poor models as they try to optimize the overall accuracy and perform badly in classes with very few samples. Software Engineering data in general and defect prediction datasets are not an exception and in this paper, we compare different approaches, namely sampling, cost-sensitive, ensemble and hybrid approaches to the problem of defect prediction with different datasets preprocessed differently. We have used the well-known NASA datasets curated by Shepperd et al. There are differences in the results depending on the characteristics of the dataset and the evaluation metrics, especially if duplicates and inconsistencies are removed as a preprocessing step.

Time-use studies typically have a single focus: the duration of human activities. That is, they ask respondents to report everything they did during a 24-hour period along with some indication of the starting and stopping times of those actions. This chronological reporting procedure avoids many,of the pitfalls of other survey estimation procedures and is less subject to distortion due to social desirability bias. But there are many,methodological considerations to take into account when designing a time-use survey. Decisions concerning reporting procedures and mode,of data collection may influence data quality. Likewise, the choice of follow-up probes and the treatment of simultaneous activities can determine the amount,of information available for accurate and reliable coding of activities. This paper will describe the methodological decisions our working group faced when designing a time-use survey and introduce the choices that we made. 3 Measuring How People Spend Their Time

This paper aims to provide a data definition of one master data for cross application consistency. The concepts related to Master data management in broader spectrum has been discussed. The current challenges companies are facing while implementing the MDM solutions are outlined. We have taken a case study to highlight why Master Data Management is imperative for the enterprises in optimizing their business Also we have identified some of the long term benefits for the enterprises on implementing MDM.

We present an efficiency model for data warehouse operations and analyze a data set to evaluate the model. The model contains salient variables to evaluate the efficiency of an organization's data warehouse operations for refresh processing and query production. The variables in the model include resource consumption (labor usage and computing budgets), system usage measures (users and queries), quality measures (data age and availability), and a size measure (change data amount). We report on the evaluation of a data set collected from USA and non USA-based (mostly Korean) organizations using input-oriented Data Envelopment Analysis. The analysis indicates wide dispersions in reported data, large differences in labor budgets between efficient and inefficient firms, few organizations efficient in both refresh processing and query production, and the difficulty of providing some data (computing budgets and flexibility ratio). Follow-up interviews with selected organizations provided insights about the value of efficiency comparisons of information technology organizations and suggestions to improve the model.

These comments and recommendations are products of the authors' experiences within their centers and their past works in the area of environmental neurotoxicology and teratology. We present both missteps and achievements in the hope that our collective experience can help guide in the planning and implementation of the National Children's Study.