Article: The design and implementation of a software infrastructure for IQ assessment Journal: International Journal of Information Quality (IJIQ) 2012 Vol.3 No.1 pp.49 - 70 Abstract: Information quality assessment of technical documentation is an integral part of quality management of products and services. Technical documentation is usually assessed using questionnaires, checklists, and reviews. This is cumbersome, costly and prone to errors. Acknowledging the fact that only people can assess certain quality aspects, we suggest complementing these with software-supported automatic quality assessment. The many different encodings and representations of documentation, e.g., various XML dialects and XML Schemas/DTDs, is one problem. We present a system, a software infrastructure, where abstraction and meta modelling are used to define reusable analyses and visualisations that are independent of specific encodings and representations. We show how this system is implemented and how it: 1) reads information from documentations; 2) performs analyses on this information; 3) visualises the results to help stakeholders understand quality issues. We introduce the system, the architecture and implementation, its adaptation to different formats of documentations and types of analyses, along with a number of real world cases exemplifying the feasibility and benefits of our approach. Altogether, our approach contributes to more efficient information quality assessments. Inderscience Publishers - linking academia, business and industry through research

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Title: The design and implementation of a software infrastructure for IQ assessment

Authors: Morgan Ericsson; Anna Wingkvist; Welf Löwe

Addresses: School of Computer Science, Physics, and Mathematics, Linnaeus University, 351 95 Växjö, Sweden. ' School of Computer Science, Physics, and Mathematics, Linnaeus University, 351 95 Växjö, Sweden. ' School of Computer Science, Physics, and Mathematics, Linnaeus University, 351 95 Växjö, Sweden

Abstract: Information quality assessment of technical documentation is an integral part of quality management of products and services. Technical documentation is usually assessed using questionnaires, checklists, and reviews. This is cumbersome, costly and prone to errors. Acknowledging the fact that only people can assess certain quality aspects, we suggest complementing these with software-supported automatic quality assessment. The many different encodings and representations of documentation, e.g., various XML dialects and XML Schemas/DTDs, is one problem. We present a system, a software infrastructure, where abstraction and meta modelling are used to define reusable analyses and visualisations that are independent of specific encodings and representations. We show how this system is implemented and how it: 1) reads information from documentations; 2) performs analyses on this information; 3) visualises the results to help stakeholders understand quality issues. We introduce the system, the architecture and implementation, its adaptation to different formats of documentations and types of analyses, along with a number of real world cases exemplifying the feasibility and benefits of our approach. Altogether, our approach contributes to more efficient information quality assessments.

Keywords: information quality assessment; software-based analysis; technical documentation; software infrastructure; quality management; abstraction; metamodelling; reusable analysis; visualisation.

DOI: 10.1504/IJIQ.2012.050049

International Journal of Information Quality, 2012 Vol.3 No.1, pp.49 - 70

Received: 04 Apr 2012
Accepted: 30 Jul 2012
Published online: 13 Sep 2014 *

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Title: The design and implementation of a software infrastructure for IQ assessment

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