Data Quality

The quality of product data is enhanced with data quality, which provides classification, standardization, and matching to refine item data and to prevent duplicate items. Item data can be inconsistent, especially when imported from external sources.

Data quality involves the following:

• Data quality checking

• Data quality attributes

• Classification

• Standardization

• Matching

Data Quality Checking

When you check data quality, data quality applies classification, standardization, and matching to the items that you are creating, editing, or importing, and then presents you with the results for acceptance.

You can check the quality of your product data:

• When you are creating a single item interactively

• When you are creating multiple items interactively

• When you are editing an item interactively

• By running a periodically scheduled process that checks the items in an item class

• When you are importing a batch of items

Data Quality Attributes

Data quality depends primarily on the values of designated attributes. You define the detailed rules for the relationships between these data quality attributes, which are used for either standardization or matching. Then, you designate these attributes at the item class level.

Categorization

Categorization includes suggested assignments of items to one or more catalogs and to categories within those catalogs. For example, if the Power attribute equals 10 watts and the Capacity attribute equals 300 ohms and the Capacitance attribute equals 10 microfarads, then the item belongs to the Capacitor category. Categorization rules are defined using the Manage Item Rule Sets task.

Standardization

You can define rules that make the values of specified item attributes consistent with desired norms. For example, you might convert all Fahrenheit temperature values to Celsius, or all English measurements to metric. You can also use standardization to merge divergent forms of attribute values into a single consistent form, such as by changing the unit of measure values in. and IN to Inches. Standardization rules are defined using the Manage Item Rule Sets task.

Matching

You can define rules for detecting when an item that is being created or imported matches an item that already exists in the Oracle Product Hub repository. For example, suppose that if power supply items differ only in the finish style of the casing, then they are considered to match existing items. To get this result, you would not use the hypothetical Casing Style attribute as a match-rule attribute.