Gregory Farmakis and Photis Stavropoulos
Liaison Systems SA
77 Akadimias Str,
106 78 Athens
Greece
email: photis@liaison.gr
Quality in the Statistical Information Life-Cycle (INSPECTOR) is a research and development project partially funded by the IST Program , CPA4/2000: Statistical tools, methods & applications for the Information Society.
The main objective of the project is the design and development of a generic, distributed and flexible data validation system, which will be able to be seamlessly integrated in the current (or future) processes of statistical data collection, in order to ensure and monitor data quality. The system will be accessible in a distributed way in order to validate large statistical data sets before their transmission or even throughout their production, ensuring homogeneity and consistency which are critical quality parameters of the validation process and the data quality in general. Among the critical project objectives are, the development of a formal framework for the classification and semantic notation of validation rules, the design, development and population of the rules repository, the development of the validation engine and a, Java application implemented, Validation Client.
The main concept underlying our approach is the treatment of validation rules as metadata, as opposed to the usual approach of implementing case specific validation programs. In this talk we will present this novel representation of validation rules, its importance for the design of the validation software, and the project's progress that far.