Business Process Modeling towards Data Quality Assurance

Data is produced and consumed everyday by information systems, and its inherent quality is a fundamental aspect to operational and support business activities. However, inadequate data quality often causes severe economic and social losses in the organizational context. The problem addressed in this paper is how to assure data quality, both syntactically and semantically, at information entity level. An information entity is a model representation of a real world business entity. To address this problem, we have taken an organizational engineering approach, consisting in using a business process-modeling pattern for describing, at a high level of abstraction, how to ensure and validate business object data. The pattern defines a conceptual data quality model with specific quality attributes. We use object-oriented concepts to take advantage of concepts such as inheritance and traceability. The concepts and notation we use are an extension to the Unified Modeling Language. A case study is detailed exemplifying the use of the proposed