Bellman : A Data Quality Browser

When a data analyst starts a new project, she is often presented with one or more very large databases (containing hundreds or thousands of tables). Extracting useful information from the databases can be a difficult problem: documentation is usually minimal, the data is poorly structured and difficult to join, and the quality of the data is often poor. As an aid in exploratory analysis, we are developing a data quality browser that allows the analyst to quickly gain an understanding of the contents of the tables and their relationships. In addition, the browser serves as a platform for issuing data mining queries targeted towards a further understanding of data quality problems. We illustrate the utility of the data quality browser with several examples.