Improving financial data quality using ontologies

The performance of financial decision‐making directly concerns both businesses and individuals. Data quality is a key factor for decision performance. As the availability of online financial data increases, it also heightens the problem of data quality. In this paper, a taxonomy is created for data quality problems. More importantly, an ontology‐based framework is proposed to improve the quality of online financial data. An empirical evaluation of the framework with the financial data of real‐world firms provides preliminary evidence for the effectiveness of the framework. The framework is expected to support decision‐making in finance and in other domains where data is spread across multiple sources with overlap but complementary in content.