Quality Assessment Social Networks: A Novel Approach for Assessing the Quality of Information on the Web

The unprecedented volume of information on the Web brings the practical difficulties for the information consumers to assess the quality of information. The wide variety of web users and distinct situations at their hands pose the difficulties to the quality assessment (QA) process, which must be customizable according to the information consumer’s needs. To that end, we (1) introduce the Web Quality Assessment model formalizing the QA process driven by the customizable sets of QA policies and (2) propose a novel concept of the QA social networks improving the QA process by reinforcing the number of relevant QA policies successively applied to the consumed resources by sharing the QA policies between users who are trusting each other. Since the ability to assess the information quality will play a fundamental role in the continued evolution of the Web, we are convinced that the concept of QA social networks can contribute in this area.