Law and Information

I had the pleasure and honor to serve, together with Martin Eppler and Markus Helfert, as a Guest Editor of a 2004 Special Issue of the International Journal Studies in Communication Science on Information Quality. This special issue has recently been released and brings together researchers in the domain of business and organizational studies, as well as information technology and legal scholars to share findings regarding information quality and information quality management. Here’s an overview of contributions and contributors:

Herbert Burkert, professor of information law and president of the Research Center for Information Law at the University of St. Gallen (Switzerland) as well as an international fellow at Yale Law School and a visiting scholar at New York Law School, offers in his contribution “Law and Information Quality” some skeptical observations on law aimed at regulating information quality. In essence, he argues that information quality is a subject best to be avoided by law, although the pressure on law to regulate increases in the context of issues that law has to decide upon. In this fascinating article, Burkert provides a theoretical framework of law’s relations to information quality and explores information quality in the context of law’s own products.

Larry English (U.S.A.), one of the pioneers and thought leaders in the IT-driven information quality field, examines the role of information quality-related regulation from a management point of view and analyzes its impact on management practices. His normative approach rooted in information technology also consists of outlining ways of improving information and data quality pragmatically.

Tom Redman (U.S.A.), another early leader in the information quality community, discusses various barriers that companies must overcome if they want to manage information quality systematically. Redman not only focuses on key barriers and outlines their logic, he also shows ways of how to overcome them.

Retha de la Harpe and Dewald Roode (South Africa), investigate data quality through a theoretical lens by applying the relatively novel theory of actor-networks to data quality. Their discussion is grounded in the context of medical practice and demonstrates that actor-networks are a powerful conceptual framework that emphasizes technical and social issues. Their theoretical framework can be used to explore data quality in a way that complements the traditional management oriented approach to this topic.

Pankaj Kamthan (Canada) examines the quality of visual information that is generated with the help of UML – the universal markup language, which can be seen as the new, graphic lingua franca of software developers. The contribution extends the application of information quality frameworks to graphic information. This is surely a future application field for information quality that offers great potential.

Fabrizio De Amicis, a business consultant and researcher working in the financial services sector, and Carlo Batini from the Universit� di Milano Bicocca (Italy) propose a detailed methodology for data quality assessment that combines both subjective, qualitative and objective, quantitative data quality assessment. Both types of results are compared and provide a detailed data quality analysis which helps to identify actions for data quality improvements. The methodology is applied to financial data from a real case study that demonstrates the richness of this approach.

Cinzia Cappiello, Chiara Francalanci and Barbara Pernici from Politecnico di Milano (Italy) present a semi-automatic and rule-based methodology to perform quality assessment and improvement. The results demonstrate how data quality monitoring rules are defined with an initial data and process analysis and how they can trigger both information process-oriented and data-oriented improvement actions. The monitoring and assessment component is organized around a data quality management architecture – the quality factory – providing a complete set of tools for data quality management.

Certain articles can be downloaded for free. Please check this site. If you’re interested in an article that hasn’t been made available, please send me an email.