# What is good vocabulary for describing Data Quality?

**URL:** <https://forum.openreferral.org/t/what-is-good-vocabulary-for-describing-data-quality/816>\
**Category:** Technical\
**Created:** [April 9, 2026, 11:38pm UTC](https://forum.openreferral.org/t/what-is-good-vocabulary-for-describing-data-quality/816 "2026-04-09T23:38:40Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 2

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**Author:** ![oughnic](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/o/7feea3/32.png) [@oughnic](https://forum.openreferral.org/u/oughnic)\
**Post date:** [June 2, 2026, 1:59pm UTC](https://forum.openreferral.org/t/what-is-good-vocabulary-for-describing-data-quality/816/21 "2026-06-02T13:59:12Z")

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Perhaps - I’m aiming the summary at a general audience who may stop reading when words like syntactic and semantic, and definitely don’t like metadata

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**Author:** ![bloom](https://dub1.discourse-cdn.com/flex017/user_avatar/forum.openreferral.org/bloom/32/103_2.png) [@bloom](https://forum.openreferral.org/u/bloom)\
**Post date:** [June 2, 2026, 2:28pm UTC](https://forum.openreferral.org/t/what-is-good-vocabulary-for-describing-data-quality/816/22 "2026-06-02T14:28:16Z")

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Always a challenge.

Personally I tend to be more averse to the risks of misleading readers than the risk of losing them. But of course we have to consider these things and I don’t assume I’ve figured it all out.

Given any audience of people ready to think about “directory information systems,” I think it’s reasonable to expect them to be able to think about the difference between syntax and semantics.

Whereas I also think it is hard to expect people to understand that data can be “technically correct” AND “meaningfully correct” AND “factually incorrect”

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