An ontology-based quality framework for data integration

The data integration (DI) process involves multiple users with roles such as administrators, integrators and end-users, each of whom may have requirements which have an impact on the overall quality of an integrated resource. Users’ requirements may conflict with each other, and so a quality framework for the DI context has to be capable of representing the variety of such requirements and provide mechanisms to detect and resolve the possible inconsistencies between them. This paper presents a framework for the specification of DI quality criteria and associated user requirements. This is underpinned by a Description Language formalisation with associated reasoning capabilities which enables a DI setting to be tested to identify those elements that are inconsistent with users’ requirements. The application of the framework is illustrated with an example showing how it can be used to improve the quality of an integrated resource.