Business Metadata: Capturing Enterprise Knowledge

Chapter 10 Data and Information Quality as Business Metadata

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any other special codes or text values like N/A that probably mean the

same thing as “not available.” In a numeric field, zero or a string of

nines (9999) often mean the same thing as NULL. For example, in the

report, the value “Unspecified” occurred in 62% of the data. This is

a high percentage; is it reasonable?

Range of Values: Often, outliers exist in the minimum or maximum

value spectrum of the data and can represent anomalies in the data,

for example, a code like 9999 in a numeric field often shows up as

a maximum value in a field. The example provided in the report

shows no ...