Data Item Quality for Biobanks

Biobanks collect and store items of biological material and provide these resources for medical research together with data associated with these items. In this paper, we contribute to the fundamentals necessary for establishing data quality management for biobanks. We analyse the properties of biobanks which are most important for an adequate data quality management system. We provide a comprehensive description of the concept of quality for biobank data. For this, we state that the quality of the biobank data can be categorized into data item quality and metadata quality and provide the detailed treatment of common data item quality characteristics, in particular, completeness, accuracy, reliability, consistency, timeliness, precision, and provenance. These definitions of data item quality characteristics are a necessary basis for data quality representation and management. The precise definition of these data quality characteristics also required as a necessary basis for integrating data items derived from different sources which is frequently needed for larger medical studies.