Quality-Driven Query Answering for Integrated Information Systems

The Internet and the World Wide Web (WWW) are becoming more and more important in our highly interconnected world as more and more data and information is made available for online access. Many individuals and governmental, commercial, cultural, and scientific organizations increasingly depend on information sources that can be accessed and queried over the Web. For example, accessing flight schedules or retrieving stock information has become common practice in todays world. When accessing this data, many people assume that the information accessed is accurate and that the data source can be accessed reliably. These two examples clearly demonstrate that not only the information content is important, the information about the quality of the data becomes an even more crucial and critical aspect for individuals and organizations when they make plans or take decisions based on the results of their queries. More precisely, having access to information of known quality becomes critical for the well-being and indeed for the functioning of modern industrialized societies. Surprisingly, despite the urgent need for clear concepts and techniques to judge and value quality and for technology to use such (meta) information, very few scientific results are known and available. Few approaches are known to use quality measures for accessing and querying information over the Web. Only a limited number of products on the IT market address this burning problem.