DataQ: a data flow quality monitoring system for aggregative data infrastructures

Aggregative Data Infrastructures (ADIs) are information systems offering services to integrate content collected from data sources so as to form uniform and richer information spaces and support communities of users with enhanced access services to such content. The resulting information spaces are an important asset for the target communities, whose services demand for guarantees on their "correctness" and "quality" over time, in terms of the expected content (structure and semantics) and of the processes generating such content. Application-level continuous monitoring of ADIs becomes therefore crucial to ensure validation of quality. However, ADIs are in most of the cases the result of patchworks of software components and services, in some cases developed independently, built over time to address evolving requirements. As such they are not generally equipped with embedded monitoring components and ADI admins must rely on third-party monitoring systems. In this paper we describe DataQ, a general-purpose system for exible and cost-effective data fow quality monitoring in ADIs. DataQ supports ADI admins with a framework where they can (i) represent ADIs data fows and the relative monitoring specification, and (ii) be instructed on how to meet such specification on the ADI side to implement their monitoring functionality.