Representing and Communicating Data Quality Information

Many uses of data are dependent upon data quality.  In addition to the need to ensure that data quality is acceptable to meet the needs of potential users, information about data quality must be represented and communicated to inform the use of the data. Effectively representing and communicating data quality information is important for conducting research within and across many disciplines and for improving data sharing. 

Under the auspices of the Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP) and with collaboration among members of the ESIP Information Quality Cluster (IQC), the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) Evaluation and Quality Control (EQC) team, and the Australia/New Zealand Data Quality Interest Group (AU/NZ DQIG), a community effort has been undertaken by international Earth Science domain experts. The objective of this effort is to develop global community guidelines with practical recommendations to promote sharing and reusing of quality information at the dataset level, leveraging the experiences and expertise of a team of interdisciplinary domain experts and community best practice. Contacts have been established between the above-mentioned groups and the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Data Quality Domain Working Group and information exchange meetings have been held. A peer-reviewed paper titled “Call to Action for Global Access to and Harmonization of Quality Information of Individual Earth Science Datasets'' has been published in the Data Science Journal (DOI:http://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2021-019). One of the purposes of this BoF meeting is to broaden the disciplinary base covered by these efforts beyond Earth science in promoting consistency when representing and communicating data quality information.