An Assessment Framework for Data-Centric Systems

Standardisation, organisation and control have brought economic benefits through the application of computer based systems to large governmental, industrial and retail organisations. These benefits are also being sought from areas and organisations with a safety related context. Typically these systems employ standardised applications and large volumes of data. Such data represents individuals, system elements, their relationships and histories. Application areas span health care provision to transportation, welfare to governmental policy. In these systems it is often unclear how data errors influence the overall system behaviour or individual system outcomes. This paper provides a framework to classify the use (and reuse) of data within such systems. In addition this paper seeks to identify the ‘barriers to escalation’ that would mitigate the influence of data errors on system safety and restrict their propagation across the connected systems.