As has happened with technology revolutions before, there is much debate over whether organizations should deploy commercial large language models (LLMs) or turn to the open-source community as they build generative AI applications. The answer, of course, is that it depends on what you’re trying to accomplish. Picking the right model and infusing it with high-quality corporate data are more critical decisions. More on that in a bit.….Story continues…
Source: VentureBeat
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Before the rise of the inexpensive computer data storage, massive mainframe computers were used to maintain name and address data for delivery services. This was so that mail could be properly routed to its destination. The mainframes used business rules to correct common misspellings and typographical errors in name and address data, as well as to track customers who had moved, died, gone to prison, married, divorced, or experienced other life-changing events.
Government agencies began to make postal data available to a few service companies to cross-reference customer data with the National Change of Address registry (NCOA). This technology saved large companies millions of dollars in comparison to manual correction of customer data. Large companies saved on postage, as bills and direct marketing materials made their way to the intended customer more accurately.
Initially sold as a service, data quality moved inside the walls of corporations, as low-cost and powerful server technology became available. Companies with an emphasis on marketing often focused their quality efforts on name and address information, but data quality is recognized as an important property of all types of data. Principles of data quality can be applied to supply chain data, transactional data, and nearly every other category of data found.
For example, making supply chain data conform to a certain standard has value to an organization by: 1) avoiding overstocking of similar but slightly different stock; 2) avoiding false stock-out; 3) improving the understanding of vendor purchases to negotiate volume discounts; and 4) avoiding logistics costs in stocking and shipping parts across a large organization.
For companies with significant research efforts, data quality can include developing protocols for research methods, reducing measurement error, bounds checking of data, cross tabulation, modeling and outlier detection, verifying data integrity, etc. There are a number of theoretical frameworks for understanding data quality.
A systems-theoretical approach influenced by American pragmatism expands the definition of data quality to include information quality, and emphasizes the inclusiveness of the fundamental dimensions of accuracy and precision on the basis of the theory of science (Ivanov, 1972). One framework, dubbed “Zero Defect Data” (Hansen, 1991) adapts the principles of statistical process control to data quality.
Another framework seeks to integrate the product perspective (conformance to specifications) and the service perspective (meeting consumers’ expectations) (Kahn et al. 2002). Another framework is based in semiotics to evaluate the quality of the form, meaning and use of the data (Price and Shanks, 2004). One highly theoretical approach analyzes the ontological nature of information systems to define data quality rigorously (Wand and Wang, 1996).
A considerable amount of data quality research involves investigating and describing various categories of desirable attributes (or dimensions) of data. Nearly 200 such terms have been identified and there is little agreement in their nature (are these concepts, goals or criteria?), their definitions or measures (Wang et al., 1993). Software engineers may recognize this as a similar problem to “ilities”.
MIT has an Information Quality (MITIQ) Program, led by Professor Richard Wang, which produces a large number of publications and hosts a significant international conference in this field (International Conference on Information Quality, ICIQ). This program grew out of the work done by Hansen on the “Zero Defect Data” framework (Hansen, 1991).
In practice, data quality is a concern for professionals involved with a wide range of information systems, ranging from data warehousing and business intelligence to customer relationship management and supply chain management. One industry study estimated the total cost to the U.S. economy of data quality problems at over U.S. $600 billion per annum (Eckerson, 2002). Incorrect data – which includes invalid and outdated information – can originate from different data sources – through data entry, or data migration and conversion projects.
In 2002, the USPS and PricewaterhouseCoopers released a report stating that 23.6 percent of all U.S. mail sent is incorrectly addressed. One reason contact data becomes stale very quickly in the average database – more than 45 million Americans change their address every year. In fact, the problem is such a concern that companies are beginning to set up a data governance team whose sole role in the corporation is to be responsible for data quality.
In someorganizations, this data governance function has been established as part of a larger Regulatory Compliance function – a recognition of the importance of Data/Information Quality to organizations. Problems with data quality don’t only arise from incorrect data; inconsistent data is a problem as well. Eliminating data shadow systems and centralizing data in a warehouse is one of the initiatives a company can take to ensure data consistency.
Enterprises, scientists, and researchers are starting to participate within data curation communities to improve the quality of their common data. The market is going some way to providing data quality assurance. A number of vendors make tools for analyzing and repairing poor quality data in situ, service providers can clean the data on a contract basis and consultants can advise on fixing processes or systems to avoid data quality problems in the first place. Most data quality tools offer a series of tools for improving data, which may include some or all of the following:
- Data profiling – initially assessing the data to understand its current state, often including value distributions
- Data standardization – a business rules engine that ensures that data conforms to standards
- Geocoding – for name and address data. Corrects data to U.S. and Worldwide geographic standards
- Matching or Linking – a way to compare data so that similar, but slightly different records can be aligned. Matching may use “fuzzy logic” to find duplicates in the data. It often recognizes that “Bob” and “Bbo” may be the same individual. It might be able to manage “householding”, or finding links between spouses at the same address, for example. Finally, it often can build a “best of breed” record, taking the best components from multiple data sources and building a single super-record.
- Monitoring – keeping track of data quality over time and reporting variations in the quality of data. Software can also auto-correct the variations based on pre-defined business rules.
- Batch and Real time – Once the data is initially cleansed (batch), companies often want to build the processes into enterprise applications to keep it clean. ISO 8000 is an international standard for data quality.
Data quality assurance is the process of data profiling to discover inconsistencies and other anomalies in the data, as well as performing data cleansing activities (e.g. removing outliers, missing data interpolation) to improve the data quality.These activities can be undertaken as part of data warehousing or as part of the database administration of an existing piece of application software.
Data Quality (DQ) is a niche area required for the integrity of the data management by covering gaps of data issues. This is one of the key functions that aid data governance by monitoring data to find exceptions undiscovered by current data management operations. Data Quality checks may be defined at attribute level to have full control on its remediation steps.
DQ checks and business rules may easily overlap if an organization is not attentive of its DQ scope. Business teams should understand the DQ scope thoroughly in order to avoid overlap. Data quality checks are redundant if business logic covers the same functionality and fulfills the same purpose as DQ. The DQ scope of an organization should be defined in DQ strategy and well implemented.
Some data quality checks may be translated into business rules after repeated instances of exceptions in the past. Below are a few areas of data flows that may need perennial DQ checks:
Completeness and precision DQ checks on all data may be performed at the point of entry for each mandatory attribute from each source system. Few attribute values are created way after the initial creation of the transaction; in such cases, administering these checks becomes tricky and should be done immediately after the defined event of that attribute’s source and the transaction’s other core attribute conditions are met.
All data having attributes referring to Reference Data in the organization may be validated against the set of well-defined valid values of Reference Data to discover new or discrepant values through the validity DQ check. Results may be used to update Reference Data administered under Master Data Management (MDM).
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