This paper is an initial review of literature, investigating qualitative research, to show its relevance in information system disciplines. Qualitative research involves the use of qualitative data, such as interviews, documents, and participant observation data, to understand and explain social phenomena. Qualitative research can be found in many disciplines and fields, using a variety of appr...

Studies on trust in information sources have mostly focused on whether the source is capable of providing correct and complete information, thus overlooking another essential aspect of trust: the assessment of relevance. Information, even when true, is literally useless, unless it relates meaningfully to the informational needs and practical goals of its recipient. Moreover, relevance, exactly ...

Organizations collect customer information in order to understand and meet their customers' needs. However, consumers are becoming increasingly aware of the potential value of their personal information and the potential risks associated with disclosing it. Using the Theory of Reasoned Action and Transaction Cost Theory, a model was developed that examines the central role of risk in disclosure...

The purpose of an information retrieval (IR) system is to help users accomplish a task. IR system evaluation should consider both task success and the value of support given over the entire information seeking episode. Relevance-based measurements fail to address these requirements. In this paper, usefulness is proposed as a basis for IR evaluation.

The process of information seeking involves a varied set of tasks and interactions. Exactly how the information seeker judges the relevance of what is retrieved has been a renewed area of interest in information retrieval studies. Various studies have identified facets or categories of relevance which go beyond simple topical relevance, and there has been some recent research on how these multi...

This paper presents a first step toward the formalization of the concept of document reliability in the context of Information Retrieval (and Information Filtering). Our proposal is based on the hypothesis that the evaluation of the relevance of a document can also depend on the concept of reliability of a document. This concept has the following properties: (i) it is user-dependent, i.e., a do...

Several mathematical ideas have been investigated for Quantitative Information Flow. Information theory, probability, guessability are the main ideas in most proposals. They aim to quantify how much information is leaked, how likely is to guess the secret and how long does it take to guess the secret respectively. In this paper, we show how the Lattice of Information provides a valuable foundat...

This paper discusses nature of action research, and its particular strengths in disciplines such as information systems (IS). However concerns are raised about the quality and rigour of the conduct and reporting of action research studies. Criteria for quality and rigour of qualitative research generally, and for action research in particular, are discussed and analysed. These then form the bas...

In this paper, an Eliteness Hypothesis for information retrieval is proposed, where we define two generative processes to create information items and queries. By assuming two types of deterministic relationships between the eliteness of terms and relevance, we obtain a new theoretical retrieval framework. The resulting ranking function is a unified one as it is capable of making use of availab...

One can imagine a future society in which natural resources are irrelevant and all that counts is information. I shall discuss this possibility, plus the role that algorithmic information theory might then play as a metatheory for the amount of information required to construct something.