Data curation is a comprehensive procedure of creating, organizing, and maintaining data so that it can be retrieved and used by firms looking for specific information in various contexts. The process of curation comprises collecting, structuring, indexing and cataloguing data for the users in an organization, a group, or the general public. Data can be curated to provision business decision-making, academic needs, scientific research, or any other purpose.

Data curation is a part of the comprehensive data management process and is integrated into data preparation tasks that lay the foundations for the data sets to be subsequently used for enhancing Business Intelligence (BI). In other scenarios, raw data is served into the curation procedure for ongoing management and maintenance activities.