Quality Measures and The Information Consumer

In recent years the amount of data available to the information consumer has dramatically increased. It is now possible to search for information on an unlimited number of topics across a wide range of information environments. Although plentiful, this information is also of varying levels of quality, being produced both by professionals and those with little or no subject knowledge. As such, it is becoming increasingly difficult to find precisely what is required. The two hurdles that prevent the finding of relevant information are therefore 'information overload' and 'information quality'. Our proposed solution to this problem consists of the development of a methodology for using quality criteria as an aid to information searching. Having previously developed and presented a generic hierarchical framework of quality, and corresponding domain-specific frameworks, we now demonstrate how these models can be used by the information consumer. Using our experimental Information Search Environment the information consumer is able to create a personalised definition of quality, based on the selection of quality criteria, importance weightings, and quality level preference values. This quality definition is then used to focus information searches in their chosen subject domain. In this paper we present our approach, and show how changing this quality definition can alter the results returned from an information search.