Washing data?

[VinylxScratches]

What exactly does washing data mean? Is it removing errors and redundancy?

 

[Ken g6]

I'm not exactly sure what you're referring to, either. It sounds like you might mean "list washing", also known as "data matching" or record linkage.

The first thing that came to mind is input sanitization, but that doesn't sound as likely.

 

[VinylxScratches]

I had an interview and the lady who was not in IT said one of my functions would be washing data. She did not know really what that meant. I assumed it would be cleaning bad files that are inconsistent or something. It's for some kind of reporting.

 

[Markbnj]

Probably means literally cleaning it up. Many times data brought in for integration from internal or external legacy systems is far from perfect. You may be asked to write scripts to clean it up, or even perform manual fix-ups here and there.

 

[DaveSimmons]

She was probably told "cleaning" data and passed it on as "washing."

 

[Cogman]

I'm fairly certain it means cleaning up mistakes in data. For example, you collect data on everyone's height and weight, one guy reports he is 7'0" and 100 lbs. While neither of those figures are impossible, both together are (or at least highly unlikely). The job is to pick out what data makes sense and weed out the data that doesn't. This isn't too bad of a job to do, but it is hard to automate as it requires a human to physically be able to say "Do these number make sense in this context).

 

[thomasdp]

The company I work for (Telco) use the term Data Washing for comparing data sets across multiple systems to ensure the data we want to use is correct....

 

[imported_Dhaval00]

It is also a term used in data warehousing. Primarily has to do with cleaning, consolidating, and standardizing data, but is often confused (within the data warehousing realm) with fuzzy lookups. If this is an M$ shop, the could very well be alluding to fuzzy lookups and grouping: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms345128.aspx

 

[BoberFett]

Originally posted by: DaveSimmons
She was probably told "cleaning" data and passed it on as "washing."

The word prior to her mangling might also have been "scrubbing" which indicates removing duplicates, using formatting rules, etc.

 

[EagleKeeper]

Originally posted by: BoberFett

Originally posted by: DaveSimmons
She was probably told "cleaning" data and passed it on as "washing."

The word prior to her mangling might also have been "scrubbing" which indicates removing duplicates, using formatting rules, etc.

My thoughts:thumbsup: