Measuring Data Believability: A Provenance Approach

Data quality is crucial for operational efficiency and sound decision making. This paper focuses on believability, a major aspect of quality, measured along three dimensions: trustworthiness, reasonableness, and temporality. We ground our approach on provenance, i.e. the origin and subsequent processing history of data. We present our provenance model and our approach for computing believability based on provenance metadata. The approach is structured into three increasingly complex building blocks: (1) definition of metrics for assessing the believability of data sources, (2) definition of metrics for assessing the believability of data resulting from one process run and (3) assessment of believability based on all the sources and processing history of data. We illustrate our approach with a scenario based on Internet data. To our knowledge, this is the first work to develop a precise approach to measuring data believability and making explicit use of provenance-based measurements

Risk Game: Capturing impact of information quality on human belief assessment and decision making

This paper presents the Risk Game, a general methodology to elicit experts’ knowledge and know-how, in their ability to deal with information provided by different types of sources (sensors or humans) of variable quality, to take into account the information quality and to reason about concurrent events. It is a contrived technique capturing data expressing human reasoning features during a specific task of situation assessment. The information is abstracted by cards and its quality, which varies along the three dimensions of uncertainty, imprecision and falseness, is randomly selected by dice roll. The game has been played by experts of maritime surveillance, mostly marine officers from several nations. The Risk Game is domain-independent and can be designed for any specific application involving reasoning with multi-sources. The preliminary results obtained are promising and allow validating the efficiency of the elicitation method in capturing the link between information quality and human belief assessment. Besides the positive feedback collected from the players and their perceived effectiveness of the method, the data effectively capture the impact some specific information quality dimensions on belief assessment. We highlight, for instance, that the relevance of information perceived by the players may differ from the effective information relevance, that a high ratio of false information increases the uncertainty of the player before decision and may lead to wrong decisions, or that the context has a high impact on the decision made. Future extensions of the Risk Game are finally sketched

Application of data and information fusion

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH