SBIR Phase I: Data Cleaning as a Service

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project aims to do preliminary feasibility study to be eventually able to offer scalable data cleaning service in the Cloud Computing environment for small businesses. Despite active research on data cleaning and available commercial data cleaning solutions, many small businesses are unable to clean their in-house data to the satisfactory level due to various reasons. Often, small businesses simply do not have human or IT resources for cleaning their data. Toward these challenges, in this SBIR Phase I proposal, we claim that by extending existing state-of-the-art data cleaning solutions to be more scalable and be available in the Cloud Computing environment and offering data cleaning as a service as in Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) paradigm, small businesses can afford to have easy access to sophisticated data cleaning service for nominal fees. This effort will extend current software infrastructure to build high performance data cleaning solutions, which will be the fundamental basis of many data quality problems. Its intellectual merits lie in establishing a unifying framework that improves the scalability in data cleaning solutions and extend them to fit into the Cloud Computing environment. The broader impact/commercial potential of this project can be far reaching since the issues of data quality are ubiquitous in many businesses. With the explosive increase of data size as in "Big Data" in virtually all industries and disciplines, in particular, the ability to do the scalable execution of rich data cleaning solutions becomes ever more important. By offering such scalable data cleaning solutions in the Cloud Computing environment as chargeable service, this SBIR project aims to reach many small businesses that need to clean their complex in-house data without much investment. By implementing the whole cleaning-as-a-service using Amazon's web service infrastructure such as EC2, the company believes that the project has a great commercial potential to serve the market that did not exist before.