Search

The literature provides a wide range of techniques to assess and improve the quality of data. Due to the diversity and complexity of these techniques, research has recently focused on defining methodologies that help the selection, customization, and application of data quality assessment and improvement techniques. The goal of this article is to provide a systematic and comparative description of such methodologies. Methodologies are compared along several dimensions, including the methodological phases and steps, the strategies and techniques, the data quality dimensions, the types of data, and, finally, the types of information systems addressed by each methodology. The article concludes with a summary description of each methodology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: From a user perspective, data and services provide a complementary view of an information source: data provide detailed information about specific needs, while services execute processes involving data and returning an informative result as well. For this reason, users need to perform aggregated searches to identify not only relevant data, but also services able to operate on them. At the current state of the art such aggregated search can be only manually performed by expert users, who first identify relevant data, and then identify existing relevant services. In this paper we propose a semantic approach to perform aggregated search of data and services. In particular, we define a technique that, on the basis of an ontological representation of both data and services related to a domain, supports the translation of a data query into a service discovery process. In order to evaluate our approach, we developed a prototype that combines a data integration system with a novel information retrieval-based Web Service discovery engine (XIRE). The results produced by a wide set of experiments show the effectiveness of our approach with respect to IR approaches, especially when Web Service descriptions are expressed by means of a heterogeneous terminology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]