An evaluation of Information quality frameworks for the World Wide Web

Abstract

Over the past few years the amount of data immediately available to the consumer has rapidly increased in size. This is due to the growth of the web as an information exchange and creation environment. Data creation on the Internet is increasing as it gives web publishers the opportunity to publish their content without any standards to govern the content. Although the consumer has access to this abundance of information, the lack of standards has lead to various levels of quality problems. There has been much advancement in Search Engine technology to search through these large amounts of content and to retrieve relevant, quality information. However, not all information returned is relevant to its context and it has become more difficult for the consumer to find quality information due to these information quality issues. Barriers that have been identified with regard to the retrieval of relevant information are the problem of too much information and the quality of that information. This paper therefore address some of the issues of information quality on the web and evaluates a number of frameworks in order to identify common elements, differences and missing elements of such frameworks. A summary of the most common information quality elements is presented as a basis for a more comprehensive view of information quality frameworks available for managing and implementing quality strategies on the web.