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ACCA Strategic Professional · Strategic Business Leader · Big data and data analytics

Altair Logistics is building a data lake that will take in unstructured sensor, email and social media data from many sources. The chief data officer is concerned that, without controls, the lake will become a 'data swamp' of unknown quality and provenance. Which action best mitigates this risk?

Maintaining metadata and a data catalogue that records source, owner, quality and permitted use is the best action. It gives context and provenance to stored data, preventing a swamp, while still keeping the lake's flexibility to hold varied unstructured data, unlike restricting formats or allowing uncontrolled editing.

  1. ARestrict the lake to structured data only and delete other formats
  2. BMaintain metadata and a data catalogue recording source, owner, quality and permitted use of each datasetCorrect
  3. CAllow every analyst to add and modify datasets freely to encourage innovation
  4. DReplace the lake with a single spreadsheet for each department

Explanation

A swamp arises when data is stored without context. Cataloguing with metadata on lineage, ownership, quality and permitted use keeps data findable and trustworthy. Restricting formats defeats the lake's purpose, and unrestricted editing worsens control.

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