Abstract
Governments, the market, and individuals increasingly need well-defined, timely, accurate, reliable and appropriate information drawn from many sources. In the future, guaranteeing information quality will become both more important and more difficult as the number and variety information sources (including informal sources such as wikis and blogs) continues to grow. What mechanisms are needed to find, select, evaluate, and authenticate information that is appropriate for a given use?
Keywords
information quality assurance, evaluation mechanisms, certification and trustworthiness of information sources
Description
Grounding the research on Information Quality
Information quality is an ongoing challenge. Some of the main problems with information quality are 1) finding the right information 2) interpreting the information, and 3) trusting the information. We still do not know what determines high and low information quality or how to measure it. It is likely that guaranteeing information quality will become more difficult (and more important) in the future as 1) the social web takes off 2) semantic web starts and 3) persons have multiple aliases and pseudonyms. For governments, a major challenge is to make their decision-making and processes more transparent and rational (i.e,consider all arguments). Governments might also use their authority to certify or recommend information sources to be used in decision-making processes.
Research question
Main research question: how can we ensure that correct information is used in government decision-making?
- How can we establish trust in information?
- How to certify information sources?
- Develop recommender mechanisms?
- Can we create mechanisms for automatically assessing the trustworthiness of information sources?
- How can technology be used to automatically compare information sources?
- How can governments use recommender systems in their policy-making processes?
- What is the role of government in social webs and quality of decision-making?
- Can we create incentives for creating higher quality information?
- How can we use social networks for ensuring information quality?
