NSW government standard for data quality reporting

Agencies create or collect data and information to meet their operational and regulatory requirements. They will define, document or report their own acceptable levels of data quality according to these primary purposes via data quality statements. 

Data quality statements help users determine whether the data will be fit for their specific purpose.

The NSW Government Standard for Quality Reporting standard provides a method for agencies to create simple data quality statements that describe their datasets for secondary users. These statements can be used by:

• staff within the agency, to evaluate data for internal re-use
• staff from other agencies, where data is available for sharing
• individuals, researchers and industry, where data is published. 

The data quality statement aims to help a user understand how the dataset could be used and whether it can be compared with other, similar datasets. This method can also be used by agencies when planning data collection exercises, or to evaluate datasets acquired from external sources.