Liliendahl on Data Quality

Always remember to include Shakespeare in a blog, right?

Now, it is actually disputable if Shakespeare has anything to do with the title of this blog post. Double Falshood is the (first part of the) title of a play claimed to be based on a lost play by Shakespeare (and someone else). The only fact that seems to be true in this story is that the plot of the play(s) is based on an episode in Don Quixote by Cervantes.  “The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote of La Mancha”, which is the full name of the novel, is probably best known for the attack on the windmills by don Quijote (the Spanish version of the name).

All this confusion about sorting out who, what, when and where, and the feeling of tilting at windmills, seems familiar in the daily work in trying to fix master data quality.

And indeed “double falsehood” may be a good term for the classic challenge in the data quality kind of deduplication, which is to avoid false positives and false negatives at the same time.

Now, back to work.