Glossary · Data, timing and communication
Quality status
Also known as: data quality status
In industrial data exchange, a quality status is metadata indicating whether a data value is valid, uncertain, bad, substituted or stale. It travels with the value so that the consumer can decide whether to use it.
- Data and interfaces
- Integrated systems
In one sentence
A quality status tells consumers whether a value is valid, uncertain, bad, substituted or stale; this metadata must never be dropped at interfaces.
Example
A gateway marks an oven temperature as “uncertain” while the sensor is warming up, and the oven controller ignores the value until its status changes to “good.”
How it applies
- Integrated systems: Keep the quality status with the value across every gateway, historian and dashboard. Many integrations drop it and forward the last value as if it were valid.
- Functional safety: Define what consumers do with each status: use, use with a warning, replace with a safe default or stop. Substituted values must be marked so that nobody mistakes them for measurements.
- Evidence: A quality status stored in logs shows later whether a decision was based on valid data, which supports incident analysis and claims about sensor data integrity.
- AI and retrieval: Training data and analytics should filter or weight values by quality status; otherwise bad data is learned as normal behavior.
Quality status vs. stale data
Stale data can still carry the status “good” if the source does not know that it is outdated. Age must be checked separately with the timestamp.