Data Quality and Curation

Data quality is an issue that touches on every aspect of the research data landscape and is therefore appropriate to examine in the context of planning for future research data infrastructures. As producers, researchers want to believe that they produce high quality data; as consumers, they want to obtain data of the highest quality. Data centres typically have stringent controls to ensure that they only acquire and disseminate data of the highest quality. Data managers will usually say that they improve the quality of the data they are responsible for. Much of the infrastructure that will emit, transform, integrate, visualise, manage, analyse, and disseminate data during its life will have dependencies, explicit or implicit, on the quality of the data it is dealing with.