Representation and Certification of Data Quality on the Web

The large majority of users accesses Web pages without considering the quality of their contents. In the Web environment, users are not provided tools that measure the quality and reliability of information, while Web information is often non reliable, as it is gathered from different sources that may not be integrated and consistent with each other. In distributed systems, such as the Internet, databases belong to different domains, are built according to different requirements and are updated at times and with procedures that depend on the specific context. Consequently, when information is integrated, problems concerning data consistency, accuracy, usability, and timeliness can arise. This paper addresses these issues and proposes a tool for the evaluation of data quality on the Web and for the management of the related certification process. For this purpose, the paper defines a data quality representation model and a language for the description and implementation of quality metadata by comparing different standards from the literature.