Data Profiling as a Process - Bridging the Gap Between Academia and Practitioners

Dealing with data necessitates understanding data, which can be facilitated by analyzing its metadata. This metadata is often not readily available, and thus, needs to be extracted and collected. This activity is called data profiling and is well established and researched in the literature. However, what is missing is a structured description of a holistic data profiling process, that puts together all the individual pieces and guides a user from the problem to the solution. This paper describes such a process and the results and insights that have been achieved so far.