Call For Papers

Topics of Interest

We welcome contributions from researchers and practitioners from diverse fields regarding case studies, open challenges, experiences, proposed solutions on the theme of Online Information Quality. The workshop will tackle (among others) the following topics:

Definitions of quality and quality dimensions. Several quality dimensions can be considered when assessing online information. Accuracy, precision, complexity, completeness,neutrality and transparency are examples of such qualities. Is it possible to define a minimum list of fundamental qualities? How is such a boundary defined? How are such dimensions related to each other?

Online uses and purposes of information quality assessments. Online actors rarely share and search in a vacuum, but instead share and/or look for information for a specific reason. We may look for information to answer a specific question, and perhaps act on that answer, but also to enlarge our horizon, stay up to date, or simply for diversion. Similarly, information can be shared to inform or help others, but also to convince them of a particular viewpoint, or often even to influence their behaviour. This inevitably influences how information is valued, both from the perspective of the producer/disseminator as from the perspective of the consumer. For example, for historians, the veracity of provenance of the information encountered may be more important than the veracity of the content itself. It may be more important to know that a given document was authentically authored by Julius Caesar, than to know that its content is accurate. Vice-versa, for Computer Scientists, the veracity of provenance may be as important as the veracity of the information itself: knowing that a given hotel review was really produced by a given author on a given website may be as important as understanding that its content is veracious.

Methods to assess online information quality. What are the roles of NLP and of machine learning when assessing the quality of online information? How is it possible to combine these automated methods with human-in-the-loop methods (e.g., niche/crowdsourcing, social network analysis)?

Societal and economic impact of online information quality. From restaurant reviews to political discussions, online information has a huge societal and economic impact. On the one hand, it would be important to quantify such an impact. On the other hand, it is important to understand the value of the various possible assessments, so to be able to prioritize those assessments which value is higher. Especially considering the computational burden of such computation, this would allow optimizing this estimation. From this vantage points, two relevant areas of investigation might be:

  1. Quality of information related to business (or organizational/strategic) decisions. Digital tools and the flow of information online contribute to the emergence of issues that need to be faced by organizations (both for-profit and not for profit). In turn, by determining the strategy-making agenda of these organizations, such issues have a big impact on the society and on the economy, which these organizations influence through their behavior. An example is the waves of interest and centrality assigned by firms to sustainability issues whenever crisis happen and become a “hot topic” in online discussions.
  2. The use/abuse/misuse of high/low quality information in making policy decisions. The weakening of traditional political forces and structures and the emergence of bottom-up social movements that either influence indirectly or govern directly the policy-making process in an increasing amount of countries, poses the problem of how political decisions are made. In particular, policy analysts are called to consider the risks of drifting into populism or sheer bad policy due to an ill-informed decision-making process influenced by “bad information and framing”.

Processability of online information quality and HCI aspects. If one of the goals of the assessment of information quality is the increase of the user awareness when accessing online information, it is important to understand what are the processability limits of such users when accessing this augmented information. In fact, even supposing we can estimate a large amount of qualities, such estimates need to be processed by users in order to be effective.

Paper Submission

We welcome two types of contributions:

  • Full Papers (8 pages max, including references): to present mature and novel works;
  • Short Papers (4 pages max, including references): to present early-stages works and/or late-breaking results.

Papers should be written in double-column ACM format. Templates are available from the ACM website, (selecting the SIGCONF proceedings template).

Papers can be submitted through the EasyChair submission system at https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=oinq2018. Accepted contributions will be published on the CEUR-WS website (or equivalent).

Important Dates

Paper submission: April 6th, 2018

Author notification: April 20th, 2018

Camera-ready version: April 24th, 2018

Workshop date: May 27th, 2018