Читать книгу Managing Data Quality - Tim King - Страница 20

Managing Data Quality

4

Use of the term ‘knowledge’ suggests an understanding acquired through experience or education, putting knowledge outside the scope of this book; for example, it doesn’t matter how many books you read about cycling, it is only when you have ridden a bike that you have knowledge of how to cycle!

Another complication is use of the terms ‘structured data’ and ‘unstructured data’. These terms have been a handy tool for marketing teams who are promoting particular software functionality (typically to extract meaning from unstructured data), but the two terms hide the reality that no data set in digital form is either fully structured or fully unstructured.

Structured data contain explicit, discrete elements (e.g. the tables, columns and keys within a relational database or the tags within an XML file) to represent meaning. These elements enable automation to generate insight and foresight from the meaning (e.g. being able to identify all the children in a hospital database by filtering the rows where age is less than 18).

Unstructured data are fundamentally text and images, which provide meaning in a way that requires either human expertise or artificial intelligence methods to process the meaning (e.g. a doctor reviews the medical scan that is the content of an image file).

In these examples, though, the database will typically also include unstructured elements (e.g. a free-text field to capture observational notes) and the digital file of the MRI scan will also include structured data in the form of metadata (e.g. the creation date) to support management of all the images.

Furthermore, a spreadsheet is essentially semi-structured, sitting somewhere between a database and an image file, because the rows and columns provide some structure but without the full richness of a relational database or an XML file.

In summary, no data set is ever entirely structured or unstructured. Structure is definitely important to data quality, though, because it captures a more precise, controllable set of requirements for the data. Requirements for unstructured data are less easy to enforce by definitive, repeatable computer-based algorithms.

Data as part of business activities

Any business activity should support the strategy of the organisation (and may have some part to play in developing this strategy). There should be governance in place to ensure that there is suitable senior or executive control and monitoring of this activity. Business activity in this context is not just applicable to commercial organisations, but refers to the activity by which any organisation delivers its core mission. Figure 1.1 illustrates this relationship.