Data quality has always been an important issue for companies, and this is even more the case today. Business and legislative pressures coupled with the explosion in the amount of data created by organizations is leading to increased corporate attention on improving the quality and accuracy of business data.

This paper reviews current industry problems concerning data quality, and takes a detailed look at how companies are addressing quality problems with customer, product, and other types of corporate data. It explains why data quality projects often evolve into master data management projects, and discusses how master data can be extracted from unstructured business content and integrated into traditional corporate data systems.