Efficient Allocation Of Quality Improvement Efforts To Support The Definition Of Data Service Offerings

The quality of data is often defined as “fitness for use”, i.e., the ability of a data collection to meet user requirements. The assessment of data quality dimensions should consider the degree to which data satisfy users’ needs. User expectations are clearly related to the selected information and at the same time the information can have different utilities depending on the type of user that accesses it. In this paper, the information is considered as a product of a specific service and data quality as a component of the service quality. For each service, it is possible to identify a provider and a final user. In the data quality literature, authors have always only considered as important the final users’ perspective declaring that providers should adapt their service offerings in order to completely satisfy users requirements. However, it is necessary to consider that providers have their own requirements in provisioning services since they should evaluate costs and benefits related to their activity. Therefore, we advocate the need for service offerings that define the most suitable quality targets that contemporarily satisfy providers and users’ needs. This paper presents a utility-based model of the provider and customers’ interests developed on the basis of multi-class offerings. The model is exploited to analyze the optimal service offerings that allow the efficient allocation of quality improvements activities for the provider.