WG6: Quality Control in Digital Libraries

Objectives

The Web has dramatically increased the quantity of information available, but it has decreased its quality as well. The quality decrease is manifest at several levels: pseudo-science Web pages, non-professional newswires, blogs, and scientific papers published without peer review. Digital Libraries (DL) are suffering this quality threaten too: a standard-format, preserved, widely, and uniformly accessible collection of data is almost useless if it contains low quality items.

The main objective of this workgroup is to study, experiment, and evaluate new quality control approaches in the field of DLs in order to improve the effectiveness of knowledge exchange. Actually the mere implementation of DLs accessible via WWW is just a first step in the dissemination of data, information, and knowledge. The second, and more challenging, step is the development of a suitable mechanism capable to help the user to find data and information of good quality and to reject those of poor quality.

Description of work

As it is traditionally done in the DL field, the initial experimentation will be done on public available repositories of scholarly publications. This sort of data is particularly suited for quality control research, since the quality of scholarly papers has been assessed for decades by means of the well known peer review mechanism. We will study complementary and alternative approaches to peer review.

More in detail, we foresee a five-step activity:

1) We will draw formal tools and techniques from various fields, like, for example, artificial societies, Web and graphs formalizations, game theory, and inverse mechanism design, to study the formal properties of the authors-readers-publishers populations.

2) We will simulate on populations of artificial agents.

3) We will implement a working prototype.

4) We will evaluate the working prototype on a population of real users.

5) We will study the extension to other collection of data especially in the area of education and of multimedia data (e.g., the Cultural Heritage Photo Digital Library at the Università di Udine (www.infoteca.it/fototeca/).

Experts involved in this workgroup: 5

Deliverables

The deliverable of the project will be: scientific publications; demonstrations of prototypes.