On the Need for Data Quality Assessment in Blockchains

Current smart contract-enabled blockchain technology exhibits limited support for data quality assessment of transaction payloads. This is critical because blockchain aims at removing intermediaries, which, however, often play an important role in guaranteeing a certain level of the quality of data used by a system. Moreover, owing to the immutability typical of blockchain, poor quality data are bound to remain stored in a blockchain possibly forever. This paper contextualises the issue of data quality in blockchains, discussing how to extend or adapt blockchain technology to support data quality assessment and identifying a set of challenges for future research.