Some Aspects of the Reliability of Information on the Web
When we look up information in the WWW we hope to find information that is correct, fitting in quantity for our purposes and written at a level that we can understand. Unfortunately, very often one of the above criteria will not be met. A young person looking for information on some aspect of physic...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Journal of Universal Computer Science
2014
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| Online Access: | http://ir.unimas.my/id/eprint/16387/ http://ir.unimas.my/id/eprint/16387/1/Some%20Aspects%20of%20the%20Reliability%20of%20Information%20on%20the%20Web%20%28abstract%29.pdf |
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| author | Narayanan, Kulathuramaiyer Maurer, Hermann Rizwan, Mehmood |
| author_facet | Narayanan, Kulathuramaiyer Maurer, Hermann Rizwan, Mehmood |
| author_sort | Narayanan, Kulathuramaiyer |
| building | UNIMAS Institutional Repository |
| collection | Online Access |
| description | When we look up information in the WWW we hope to find information that is correct, fitting in quantity for our purposes and written at a level that we can understand. Unfortunately, very often one of the above criteria will not be met. A young person looking for information on some aspect of physics may well be frustrated when finding a complex formula whose understanding requires higher mathematics. In other cases, information may be much too voluminous or too short. This seems to indicate that what we need is presentation of material at various levels of detail and complexity. But most important of all, and this is what we are going to discuss in this paper is: how do we know that what we read is actually true? We will analyse this problem in the introductory section. We will show that it is impossible to expect "too much". We will argue that some improvements can be made, particularly if the domain is restricted. We will then examine certain types of geographical information. Detailed research shows that some quantitative measurements like the area of a country or the highest mountains of a country, even if different sources disagree, can be verified by explaining why the discrepancies occur and by trusting numbers if they are identical in very different databases. |
| first_indexed | 2025-11-15T06:49:27Z |
| format | Article |
| id | unimas-16387 |
| institution | Universiti Malaysia Sarawak |
| institution_category | Local University |
| language | English |
| last_indexed | 2025-11-15T06:49:27Z |
| publishDate | 2014 |
| publisher | Journal of Universal Computer Science |
| recordtype | eprints |
| repository_type | Digital Repository |
| spelling | unimas-163872022-09-29T06:40:24Z http://ir.unimas.my/id/eprint/16387/ Some Aspects of the Reliability of Information on the Web Narayanan, Kulathuramaiyer Maurer, Hermann Rizwan, Mehmood T Technology (General) When we look up information in the WWW we hope to find information that is correct, fitting in quantity for our purposes and written at a level that we can understand. Unfortunately, very often one of the above criteria will not be met. A young person looking for information on some aspect of physics may well be frustrated when finding a complex formula whose understanding requires higher mathematics. In other cases, information may be much too voluminous or too short. This seems to indicate that what we need is presentation of material at various levels of detail and complexity. But most important of all, and this is what we are going to discuss in this paper is: how do we know that what we read is actually true? We will analyse this problem in the introductory section. We will show that it is impossible to expect "too much". We will argue that some improvements can be made, particularly if the domain is restricted. We will then examine certain types of geographical information. Detailed research shows that some quantitative measurements like the area of a country or the highest mountains of a country, even if different sources disagree, can be verified by explaining why the discrepancies occur and by trusting numbers if they are identical in very different databases. Journal of Universal Computer Science 2014 Article PeerReviewed text en http://ir.unimas.my/id/eprint/16387/1/Some%20Aspects%20of%20the%20Reliability%20of%20Information%20on%20the%20Web%20%28abstract%29.pdf Narayanan, Kulathuramaiyer and Maurer, Hermann and Rizwan, Mehmood (2014) Some Aspects of the Reliability of Information on the Web. Journal of Universal Computer Science,, 20 (9). pp. 1284-1303. ISSN 1695-1716 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/289786964_Some_Aspects_of_the_Reliability_of_Information_on_the_Web DOI:10.3217/jucs-020-09-1284 |
| spellingShingle | T Technology (General) Narayanan, Kulathuramaiyer Maurer, Hermann Rizwan, Mehmood Some Aspects of the Reliability of Information on the Web |
| title | Some Aspects of the Reliability of Information on the Web |
| title_full | Some Aspects of the Reliability of Information on the Web |
| title_fullStr | Some Aspects of the Reliability of Information on the Web |
| title_full_unstemmed | Some Aspects of the Reliability of Information on the Web |
| title_short | Some Aspects of the Reliability of Information on the Web |
| title_sort | some aspects of the reliability of information on the web |
| topic | T Technology (General) |
| url | http://ir.unimas.my/id/eprint/16387/ http://ir.unimas.my/id/eprint/16387/ http://ir.unimas.my/id/eprint/16387/ http://ir.unimas.my/id/eprint/16387/1/Some%20Aspects%20of%20the%20Reliability%20of%20Information%20on%20the%20Web%20%28abstract%29.pdf |