On the Need for Data Quality Assessment in Blockchains

Abstract

Current smart contract-enabled blockchain technology exhibits limited support for data quality assessment of transaction payloads. This is critical because blockchain aims at removing intermediaries, which often play an important role in guaranteeing a certain level of the quality of data used by a system. Moreover, owing to the immutability typical of blockchain, poor quality data are bound to remain stored in a blockchain, possibly forever. This article contextualizes the issue of data quality in blockchains, discussing how to extend or adapt blockchain technology to support data quality assessment and identifying a set of challenges for future research.