Data curation is the process of organizing and maintaining data sets so that they can be accessed and used by people looking for information. It involves collecting, cleaning, labeling, and organizing data to ensure its quality, accessibility, and usability. The purpose of data curation is to maintain the value of data over time, so that it remains available for reuse and preservation. Data curation includes all the processes needed for principled and controlled data creation, maintenance, and management, together with the capacity to add value to data.
Data curation is an important part of data management and involves a variety of activities such as access management, identification, description, preservation, transformation, and usage of data. It is a key component of an enterprise data strategy because it helps ensure that the organization can make good use of its data and comply with data-related regulatory and security requirements.
Data curation is used in various fields such as science, historical occasions, and the humanities, where increasing cultural and scholarly data from digital humanities projects requires the expertise and analytical practices of data curation. Data curation services are used to ensure that data is findable, accessible, interoperable, and trustworthy.
The main steps of data curation include data collection, cleaning, labeling, and organizing. Data curation is sometimes incorporated into data preparation work that gets data sets ready for use in business intelligence and analytics applications. Data curators are data specialists who collect, organize, clean, and transform data to make it accessible for organizations and individuals.
