Get started with ArcGIS Data Reviewer

Available with Data Reviewer license.

To produce high-quality information products and perform accurate spatial analysis, source data must meet high standards and be well maintained. ArcGIS Data Reviewer allows you to manage data for data production and analysis by providing a system for automating and simplifying data quality control that can improve data integrity.

Data Reviewer provides a set of quality control tools that allow an efficient and consistent data review process. This includes tools that support both automated and semiautomated data analysis to detect feature errors. Detected errors are stored so you can review them to correct workflows and perform data quality reporting.

Automated data review

Automated data review evaluates a feature's quality without manual intervention. Data Reviewer includes a library of configurable checks that allow you to validate data based on your quality requirements. Data Reviewer checks are designed to assess various aspects of a feature’s quality, including its attribution, integrity, or spatial relationship to other features. Data Reviewer automated checks are configurable and do not require specialized programming skills to implement. In many cases, GIS professionals with an understanding of their data’s quality requirements can implement automated review with minimal training.

In attribute rule-based workflows, checks are configured and stored in the geodatabase to assess a feature's quality. Automated review capabilities can do the following:

  • Prevent the introduction of features that do not meet quality requirements and reduce the amount of review work by assessing a feature’s quality during creation or editing.
  • Assess a feature’s quality after it is created. This can be useful when existing data is of unknown quality and a baseline assessment is needed to identify the effort required to achieve quality requirements.

To learn more about using Data Reviewer to automate workflows to assess data quality, refer to the following help topics:

Semiautomated data review

Not all errors in your data can be detected using automated methods. Semiautomated review assesses data quality using workflows guided by human interaction and input. Visual review is a common form of semiautomated review that assesses quality in ways that automated data review cannot. This includes identifying missing, misplaced, or miscoded features and other issues that automated checks may not detect.

To learn more about using Data Reviewer to implement semiautomated workflows to assess data quality, refer to the following help topics:

Error management

Data Reviewer enables error management through correction and verification. These capabilities improve data quality by identifying the source, location, and cause of errors. Error management workflows reduce costs and eliminate duplicated work by providing insight into how the error was detected, who corrected it, and whether the correction was verified.

The data review process tracks errors through a defined life cycle process, consisting of three phases: Review, Correction, and Verification.

Reviewer life cycle phases

Each phase contains one or more status values that describe the actions taken as the error progresses from one phase to another.

In attribute rule-based workflows, the geodatabase stores errors within a series of system-maintained tables. Errors are accessed using the Error Inspector pane, which provides tools for reporting, navigation, and selection of features to facilitate error correction.

To learn more about Data Reviewer error management workflows, refer to the following help topics: