Linked Edit Rules: A Web Friendly Way of Checking Quality of RDF Data Cubes

Statistical data often come with inconsistencies: records of people with negative ages, pregnant males, and underaged car drivers often populate statistical databases. National Statistical Offices (NSO) encode knowledge to detect these inconsistencies in so-called edit rules. These days, there is an increasing number of statistical data being published and linked on the Web using the RDF Data Cube vocabulary. However, edit rules are hardly ever published together with data cubes on the Web. This causes two important problems: (a) quality of RDF Data Cube data cannot be assessed; and (b) reusability of edit rules is hampered. In this paper we present Linked Edit Rules (LER), a method that makes edit rules Web friendly and reusable as Linked Data. We show that LER can be easily linked, retrieved, reused, combined and executed to check quality and consistency of RDF Data Cubes, opening up the internal NSO validation processes to the Web.