In a break from our usual editorial remit here at IQ Trainwrecks.com, we are pleased to host the second edition of the “Blog Carnival of Data Quality” initiated by Vincent McBurney back in November.

Given the volume of posts we had submitted, and the range of relevance to the theme that Vincent had suggested for this month’s Blog Carnival, some pruning has been done on the submissions that came in. In Information Quality terms, that’s kind of like inspecting defects (non-relevant posts) out of the process.

Honourable mentions

Some posts were a bit more on target, but didn’t speak to an Information/Data Quality theme sufficiently clearly. That said, we can learn a bit about only storing the information we need and archiving stuff from Richard Lee and his PDF Black Holes. Likewise, John W. Furst’s advice about disaster recovery, while not strictly relevant to the Data Quality agenda, should have some relevance to all (availability/accessibility are often cited as quality critieria for information).

Gold Medal Blogger

Beth Breidenbach was quite busy over the past month.

She created an agreggator for Information Quality blogs. She blogged about the new education programmes in Information Quality. She wrote about Quality in unstructured data and a tonne of other things. Taken together, Beth’s posts show the coming challenges in IQ/DQ (unstructured/semi-structured information), the beginnings of a professional discipline with strong academic foundations, and the importance to organisations of the quality of their information. All of which are important themes going into 2008 and beyond.

The Others…

Steven Sarsfield shared with us his “Winners and Losers in Information Quality“, where he highlights the importance of good quality information to the ‘goodwill’ a company has with their customers. Also, who’d have thought that improving the quality of your information might help save the planet?

I wrote a post over on my blog, the DoBlog, addressing what would make me happy (from an Information Quality perspective) in 2008, and looking back over 2007 at what went well in the Information Quality world. Hopefully it will provoke some thought and/or debate on the direction of the profession.

Finally, Vincent shared his look back at data integration software in 2007 – a year of performance improvements and consolidation for the big vendors and a continuation of the open source ETL gold rush.

That concludes this edition. Submit your blog article to the next edition of Carnival of Data Quality using the Carnival Submission Form.</a>

Past posts and future hosts can be found on the Blog carnival index page.

The IT Compliance Institute has reported that the number of affected customer credit card records that were nabbed in the TJX (TKMAXX) Data Breach a while back is actually double the amount originally thought.

Quoting from their coverage…

“Recently filed court documents indicate that the scale of the TJX data breach was essentially double what was originally announced, involving 94 million accounts rather than 45.6 million.

The new number surfaced in court documents filed by a group of banks that are suing the retailer over the incident, and are trying to have the matter certified as a class action suit.

The documents cited figures from the card companies rather than from TJX, indicated that 65 million Visa and 29 million MasterCard accounts were exposed.”

Ho hum.

Why is this a trainwreck?  Why don’t you tell us (we already know).