A Methodology to Evaluate Important Dimensions of Information Quality in Systems

Abstract

Assessing the quality of the information proposed by an information system has become one of the major research topics in the last two decades. A quick literature survey shows that a significant number of information quality frameworks are proposed in different domains of application: management information systems, web information systems, information fusion systems, and so forth. Unfortunately, they do not provide a feasible methodology that is both simple and intuitive to be implemented in practice. In order to address this need, we present in this article a new information quality methodology. Our methodology makes use of existing frameworks and proposes a three-step process capable of tracking the quality changes through the system. In the first step and as a novelty compared to existing studies, we propose decomposing the information system into its elementary modules. Having access to each module allows us to locally define the information quality. Then, in the second step, we model each processing module by a quality transfer function, capturing the module’s influence over the information quality. In the third step, we make use of the previous two steps in order to estimate the quality of the entire information system. Thus, our methodology allows informing the end-user on both output quality and local quality. The proof of concept of our methodology has been carried out considering two applications: an automatic target recognition system and a diagnosis coding support system.