What do we mean when we talk about ‘quality’? A white paper for analysis.

I recently spent some time forming some ideas about what 'quality’ means in analysis. It’s been an interesting exercise as largely, how we assign quality (and any associated value) remains a largely subjective exercise.

I was interested in this at two levels really. Firstly, I’ve spent most of my career analysing and processing information to discern facts and weighing them for their quality to make onward recommendations. Secondly, for a long time I’ve been involved with a community of research that is seeking to objectively store and re-use such facts. I guess in a way we’re trying to replicate the wisdom that we see residing in the heads of people who generally have the experience and knowledge to determine what quality is?

On this journey, I found it kind of fun to mashup the thinking contained in ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’ by Robert Pirsig with the technical analysis contained in Matthew West’s ‘Developing High Quality Data models’. Both of these came to their own definitions of ‘quality’ and what it means in analysis.

Image from here

I found it useful to develop two use cases that show how we think about ‘quality’ in practice.

For anyone interested in reading further; feel free to read a copy of this whitepaper - here.

I’m looking forward to the continued collaboration with the UK ontological community to keep putting these ideas (ideals?) into practice!

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