InfoSphere QualityStage tasks

You can use InfoSphere® QualityStage® to establish a clear understanding of your data and to improve data quality.

Your organization can use InfoSphere QualityStage to complete the following tasks:

Data investigation

You use InfoSphere QualityStage to understand the nature and extent of data anomalies and enable more effective data cleansing and matching. Investigation capabilities give your organization complete visibility into the condition of data at any moment. Data problems in legacy sources can be identified and corrected before they corrupt new systems.

Investigation uncovers potential anomalies, metadata discrepancies, and undocumented business practices. Invalid values and default values are identified so that they can be corrected or added to fields that are proposed as matching criteria.

Data standardization

Creating a standardized view of your data enables your organization to maintain accurate views of key entities such as customer, partner, or product. Data from multiple systems is reformatted to ensure that data has the correct, specified content and format. Standardization rules are used to create a consistent representation of the data.

With data standardization, IBM® InfoSphere QualityStage Standardization Rules Designer provides capabilities to enhance standardization rule sets. You can add and modify classifications, lookup tables, and rules. You can also enhance information by completing global address cleansing, validation and certification, and geolocation, which is used for spatial information management. Longitude and latitude are added to location data to improve location-based services.

Data matching

The matching process ensures that the information that runs your enterprise is based on your business results, reflect the facts in the real world, and provide an accurate view of data across your enterprise.

Powerful matching capabilities detect duplicates and relationships, even in the absence of unique identifiers or other data values. A statistical matching engine assesses the probability that two or more sets of data values refer to the same business entity. After a match is confirmed, InfoSphere QualityStage constructs linking keys so that users can complete a transaction or load a target system with quality, accurate data.

Data survivorship

Survivorship ensures that you are building the best available view of related information. Business and mapping rules are implemented to create the necessary output structures for the target application. Fields that do not conform to load standards are identified and filtered so that only the best representation of the match data is loaded into the master data record.

Missing values in one record are supplied with values from other records of the same entity. Missing values can also be populated with values from corresponding records that have been identified as a group in the matching stage.