Standards, Guidance and Practices for Improved Data Quality

Since the mid 1980s, the Idaho National Laboratory (INL) has been involved with numerous projects to collect operational reactor data, develop data tools, and trend and analyze that data for the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). Because the data are used in subsequent risk analyses, the NRC must have confidence in the quality of the data delivered. The NRC tasked the INL to establish a comprehensive data quality assurance program. A key element of that effort was to establish a set of requirements based on industry and government standards, guidance and good practices. This paper discusses where these were found, the process of extracting the requirements and recommendations from the source materials, and the consolidation of them into a concise set of 22 standards, guidance and practices for technical data quality. While this set was created specifically for the data programs within the NRC's Office of Research, they have broad application to many high-technology industries.