Improving Data Cleaning Quality Using a Data Lineage Facility

The problem of data cleaning, which consists of removing inconsistencies and errors from original data sets, is well known in the area of decision support systems and data warehouses. However, for some applications, existing ETL (Extraction Transformation Loading) and data cleaning tools for writing data cleaning programs are insufficient. One important challenge with them is the design of a data flow graph that effectively generates clean data. A generalized difficulty is the lack of explanation of cleaning results and user interaction facilities to tune a data cleaning program. This paper presents a solution to handle this problem by enabling users to express user interactions declaratively and tune data cleaning programs.