Data Cleansing

Data cleansing or data cleaning is the process of detecting and correcting (or removing) corrupt or inaccurate records from a record set, table, or database and refers to identifying incomplete, incorrect, inaccurate or irrelevant parts of the data and then replacing, modifying, or deleting the dirty or coarse data. Data cleansing may be performed interactively with data wrangling tools, or as batch processing through scripting.
After cleansing, a data set should be consistent with other similar data sets in the system. The inconsistencies detected or removed may have been originally caused by user entry errors, by corruption in transmission or storage, or by different data dictionary definitions of similar entities in different stores.

Data Cleansing Process

The actual process of data cleansing may involve removing typographical errors or validating and correcting values against a known list of entities. Some data cleansing solutions will clean data by cross checking with a validated data set. A common data cleansing practice is data enhancement, where data is made more complete by adding related information.

Data Quality

Data quality is a perception or an assessment of data's fitness to serve its purpose in a given context. The quality of data is determined by factors such as accuracy, completeness, reliability, relevance and how up to date it is. As data has become more intricately linked with the operations of organizations, the emphasis on data quality has gained greater attention.