DaVis : A tool for Visualizing Data Quality

Data quality is a critical issue for the success of data-driven enterprises. The challenge for these enterprises is to provide accurate data inputs, correct codings, and accurate processing so that resulting data products are correct, accurate, and timely. Although one might think that the digitization of business and government would lead to better data, if anything, the reverse appears to be true. In our experience business data warehouses and data marts inevitably contain large amounts of poor quality data. Thus there is a need for better tools to help analysts identify and fix data quality problems. To meet this need we have created a data quality visualization tool called DaVis (Data Quality Visualizer). DaVis uses a tabular reduced visual representation to show a dataset, highlights inaccuracies and invalid data, and shows difference between versions of a dataset. Our experience in using DaVis on several consulting projects is that data quality visualization is quite useful in practice and that applying visualization techniques to address data quality problems is a fruitful research direction. CR