A conceptual data quality framework for IPCHEM – The European Commission Information Platform of Chemical Monitoring

Abstract EU bodies, Member State authorities and research organisations make significant efforts to monitor numerous chemicals in various matrices (water, soil, sediment, biota, indoor and outdoor air, feed, food, products, etc.) based on requirements of EU legal acts, national and international initiatives and for scientific purposes. However, to access this information today policy makers and scientists are obliged to search and retrieve data from many different sources, using different interfaces with different levels of accessibility. As a consequence, they cannot easily compare data or promptly recognize missing information in terms of spatial coverage and temporal trends. Often, the data sources, as well as their lineage are not fully traceable, and the licence conditions for data access and use often are not specified and/or provided to the end users. The European Commission designed, developed and promoted IPCHEM, the Information Platform for Chemical Monitoring with the aim to offer a unique access point for discovering and accessing chemical monitoring datasets created and/or managed by European Commission bodies, research centres, Member States, international and national organisations. IPCHEM does not aim at providing a central database, but a web based distributed infrastructure granting remote access to data originating from various data sources. This approach allows integrating chemical monitoring data from various heterogeneous sources, of different level of spatial and temporal detail. However, in order to be used for different purposes including a regulatory context, these data need to be of known and defined quality. Quality in this context goes far beyond the mere analytical data quality and requires a novel definition and standardised assessment of data quality criteria in terms of spatial, temporal, methodological and metrological traceability. This paper describes the definition of a specific methodology and its current and future implementation in the IPCHEM architecture for the quality assurance and quality control (QA/QC) of data integrated into IPCHEM. A QA/QC statement scheme is defined in order to set a quality score, based on quality scoring groups, for each dataset.