Besiki Stvilia

A model for online consumer health information quality

An ink jet printing apparatus responsive to an input digital image for producing a halftone image on a receiver, such as a lithographic plate, having halftone dots with each halftone dot being formed by one or more microdots in a screen dot of selectable areas, including an adjustable printhead for delivering different volumes of ink droplets which, when they contact the receiver, forming microdots of different areas according to the selected screen dot size. The apparatus delivers ink to the printhead and is responsive to a selected screen dot size and the digital image to control the printhead to form ink droplets of different volumes to produce a halftone image on the receiver.This article is focused on the changes needed in design to create positive solutions for all involved in design processes. It draws upon the rich discussion and discourse from a conference focused on positive design involving managers, designers, and IT specialists, all focused on overcoming the problem-based focus and decision paradigms to enhance all phases of the design processes to develop sustainable solutions for real issues in a changing world. Therefore, all fields using design, consciously or not, including management, Information Communication Technology (ICT), and designers as well, need to redesign their processes and first rethink their design paradigms on a meta level.

Composition of scientific teams and publication productivity at a national science lab

The production of scientific knowledge has evolved from a process of inquiry largely based on the activities of individual scientists to one grounded in the collaborative efforts of specialized research teams. This shift brings to light a new question: how the composition of scientific teams affects their production of knowledge. This study employs data from 1,415 experiments conducted at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory (NHMFL) between 2005 and 2008 to identify and select a sample of 89 teams and examine whether team diversity and network characteristics affect productivity. The study examines how the diversity of science teams along several variables affects overall team productivity. Results indicate several diversity measures associated with network position and team productivity. Teams with mixed institutional associations were more central to the overall network compared with teams that primarily comprised NHMFLs own scientists. Team cohesion was positively related to productivity. The study indicates that high productivity in teams is associated with high disciplinary diversity and low seniority diversity of team membership. Finally, an increase in the share of senior members negatively affects productivity, and teams with members in central structural positions perform better than other teams.

Member activities and quality of tags in a collection of historical photographs in Flickr

A huge number of informal messages are posted every day in social network sites, blogs, and discussion forums. Emotions seem to be frequently important in these texts for expressing friendship, showing social support or as part of online arguments. Algorithms to identify sentiment and sentiment strength are needed to help understand the role of emotion in this informal communication and also to identify inappropriate or anomalous affective utterances, potentially associated with threatening behavior to the self or others. Nevertheless, existing sentiment detection algorithms tend to be commercially oriented, designed to identify opinions about products rather than user behaviors. This article partly fills this gap with a new algorithm, SentiStrength, to extract sentiment strength from informal English text, using new methods to exploit the de facto grammars and spelling styles of cyberspace. Applied to MySpace comments and with a lookup table of term sentiment strengths optimized by machine learning, SentiStrength is able to predict positive emotion with 60.6p accuracy and negative emotion with 72.8p accuracy, both based upon strength scales of 1–5. The former, but not the latter, is better than baseline and a wide range of general machine learning approaches.

Research project tasks, data, and perceptions of data quality in a condensed matter physics community

To be effective and at the same time sustainable, a community data curation model needs to be aligned with the communitys current data practices, including research project activities, data types, and perceptions of data quality. Based on a survey of members of the condensed matter physics (CMP) community gathered around the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory, a large national laboratory, this article defines a model of CMP research project tasks consisting of 10 task constructs. In addition, the study develops a model of data quality perceptions by CMP scientists consisting of four data quality constructs. The paper also discusses relationships among the data quality perceptions, project roles, and demographic characteristics of CMP scientists. The findings of the study can inform the design of a CMP data curation model that is aligned and harmonized with the communitys research work structure and data practices.

INFORMATION QUALITY IN A COMMUNITY-BASED ENCYCLOPEDIA

AbstractWe examine the Information Quality aspects of Wikipedia. By a study of the discussion pages and other process-oriented pages within the Wikipedia project, it is possible to determine the information quality dimensions that participants in the editing process care about, how they talk about them, what tradeoffs they make between these dimensions and how the quality assessment and improvement process operates. This analysis helps in understanding how high quality is maintained in a project where anyone may participate with no prior vetting. It also carries implications for improving the quality of more conventional datasets.

Web credibility assessment: Conceptualization, operationalization, variability, and models

This article reviews theoretical and empirical studies on information credibility, with particular questions as to how scholars have conceptualized credibility, which is known as a multifaceted concept with underlying dimensions; how credibility has been operationalized and measured in empirical studies, especially in the web context; what are the important user characteristics that contribute to the variability of web credibility assessment; and how the process of web credibility assessment has been theorized. An agenda for future research on information credibility is also discussed.

Authority Control for Scientific Data: The Case of Molecular Biology

This article analyzes the authority control practices in molecular biology using literature review and scenario analysis and makes a comparison with bibliographic authority control. The analysis indicates the absence of conceptual authority control model in molecular bioinformatics. In addition to traditional knowledge organization tools, authority control in molecular biology requires the use of reference sequences and version numbers to identify entities and keep track of entity changes. The identified authority control issues are conceptualized as quality problems caused by four sources. This study can inform librarians and educators of the need for and approaches to authority control in molecular biology.

A workbench for information quality evaluation

This paper describes the architecture of an Information Quality Evaluation Workbench for rapid design and operationalization of information quality assessment models.

Practices of research data curation in institutional repositories: A qualitative view from repository staff

The importance of managing research data has been emphasized by the government, funding agencies, and scholarly communities. Increased access to research data increases the impact and efficiency of scientific activities and funding. Thus, many research institutions have established or plan to establish research data curation services as part of their Institutional Repositories (IRs). However, in order to design effective research data curation services in IRs, and to build active research data providers and user communities around those IRs, it is essential to study current data curation practices and provide rich descriptions of the sociotechnical factors and relationships shaping those practices. Based on 13 interviews with 15 IR staff members from 13 large research universities in the United States, this paper provides a rich, qualitative description of research data curation and use practices in IRs. In particular, the paper identifies data curation and use activities in IRs, as well as their structures, roles played, skills needed, contradictions and problems present, solutions sought, and workarounds applied. The paper can inform the development of best practice guides, infrastructure and service templates, as well as education in research data curation in Library and Information Science (LIS) schools.

Data curation in scientific teams: an exploratory study of condensed matter physics at a national science lab

The advent of big science has brought a dramatic increase in the amount of data generated as part of scientific investigation. The ability to capture and prepare such data for reuse has brought about an increased interest in data curation practices within scientific fields and venues such as national laboratories. This study employs semi-structured interviews with key scientists at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory to explore data management, curation, and sharing practices within a condensed matter physics community. Findings indicate that condensed matter physics is a highly varied field. The fields work practices and reward structures may impede the development and implementation of highly formalized curation policies focused on sharing data within the broader community. This study is an extension of a larger mixed-methods study to examine the life-cycles of virtual teams and will serve as a foundation for a larger survey of the labs user community.