Towards a Quality Service Layer for Web 2.0

Despite the help of search engines and Web directories, identifying high quality content becomes increasingly difficult as the Internet gets ever more crowded with information. Prior approaches for filtering and searching content with respect to user-specific preferences do exist: Recommendation engines employ collaborative filtering to support subjective selection, (semi-)automatic page ranking algorithms utilize the hypertext link structure of the World Wide Web to assess page importance, and trust-based systems employ social network analysis to determine the most suitable Web pages. The use of implicit and explicit user feedback, however, is often either ignored or its exploitation is limited to isolated Web sites. We thus propose a quality overlay framework that enables the collection and processing of user-feedback, and the subsequent presentation of quality-enabled content for any Web-site. We present the quality overlay framework, propose an architecture for its realization, and validate our approach by scenarios and a detailed design with sample implementation.