Data Integrity/Credibility - what's the difference and are they important?

Data integrity relates to the accuracy and availability of data.  However it mostly relates to the fact that the data matches the source (i.e. is not modified) and it therefore has integrity.  A definition can be seen on the wiseGEEK website here.

In high level terms data credibility relates to how accurate, correct or believable your data is.  This is a very important area to investigate if you want to use that data to generated something - for example a marketing campaign either by post, email or social media.  There is an associated cost with doing these things and if your data was not accurate you could be sending information to the wrong person or address.  This article by Malcolm Chisholm in Information Management discusses it here.

I think it is very important to have both data integrity and data confidence rated and measured on any data in a system or data warehouse.  This should be recorded in the metadata along with any data mapping and other important information.