Information Quality

3Dimensions of information quality and InfoQ assessment

3.1 Introduction

Information quality (InfoQ) is a holistic abstraction or a construct. To be able to assess such a construct in practice, we operationalize it into measurable variables. Like InfoQ, data quality is also a construct that requires operationalization. The issue of assessing data quality has been discussed and implemented in several fields and by several international organizations. We start this chapter by looking at the different approaches to operationalizing data quality. We then take, in Section 3.2, a similar approach for operationalizing InfoQ. Section 3.3 is about methods for assessing InfoQ dimensions and Section 3.4 provides an example of an InfoQ rating‐based assessment. Additional in‐depth examples are provided in Part II.

3.1.1 Operationalizing “data quality” in marketing research

In marketing research and in the medical literature, data quality is assessed by defining the criteria of recency, accuracy, availability, and relevance of a dataset (Patzer, 1995):

1. Recency refers to the duration between the time of data collection and the time the study is conducted.
2. Accuracy refers to the quality of the data.
3. Availability describes the information in the data made available to the analyst.
4. Relevance refers to the relevance of the data to the analysis goal: whether the data contains the required variables in the right form and whether they are drawn from the population of interest.

Kaynak and Herbig ...