This International Standard defines a general data quality model for data retained in a structured format within a computer system.

This International Standard focuses on the quality of the data as part of a computer system and defines quality characteristics for target data used by humans and systems.

Target data are those that the organization decides to analyse and validate through the model; the term non-target data covers two cases: the first refers to data that are not persistent such as data handled by an operating system; the second refers to data that could be within the scope of the standard, but an organization chooses to not apply the standard to them.

In Figure 2 the structure of a general system is displayed in a diagram: this can include information systems which in turn can include one or more computer systems.

This International Standard can be used with other standards in the SQuaRE series to establish data quality requirements, define data quality measures, or plan and perform data quality evaluations.

Data quality requirements and data quality measures can be categorized with the data quality characteristics in 5.2 and used by an evaluation process to analyse data independently from other computer system's components.

This International Standard aims to support the implementation of system's life cycle processes, such as those defined in ISO/IEC 15288.

This International Standard takes into account all data types (e.g. character strings, texts, dates, numbers, images, sounds, etc.), assigned data values and relationships between data (e.g. consistency between data in the same or in different entities); the scope does not include data produced by embedded devices or real time sensors that are not retained for further processing or historical purposes.

This International Standard does not dictate physical organization of data (i.e. data base management systems); moreover the activities of conceptual, logical and physical schema design are outside the scope of this International Standard; all processes and deliverables related to such data benefit from the application of this International Standard.

Conformance of data to the data design is included within the scope of this International Standard.

The definition of metadata is addressed by ISO/IEC 11179 and is outside the scope of this International Standard, even if it refers to metadata to evaluate data quality.

The relationship of this International Standard to industry- and domain-specific data quality standards and its precedence over these standards are determined by the user in a specific context of use.