Improving financial data quality using ontologies

The performance of financial decision-making directly concerns both businesses and individuals. Data quality is a key factor for decision performance. As the availability of online financial data increases, it also heightens the problem of data quality. In this paper, a taxonomy is created for data quality problems. More importantly, an ontology-based framework is proposed to improve the quality of online financial data. An empirical evaluation of the framework with the financial data of real-world firms provides preliminary evidence for the effectiveness of the framework. The framework is expected to support decision-making in finance and in other domains where data is spread across multiple sources with overlap but complementary in content.

► An ontology-anchored classification schema of quality problems of online financial data. ► An ontology-based framework for improving financial data quality. ► A fuzzy theory‐based baseline method for evaluating the performance of financial decision-making. ► Improving the performance in addressing the missing-value problem associated with online financial data.