Quality criteria for SBIG value controlled

1. Quality criteria for SBIG value controlled Omar LAROUK1, Salah DALHOUMI1, Jean-Pierre LARDY2 1 Systèmes d'Information et Interfaces - URSIDOC ENSSIB – Villeurbanne France 2 Université Lyon 1 – URFIST – Villeurbanne France larouk@enssib.fr, dalhoumi@enssib.fr, lardy@univ-lyon1.fr 1- Organizing knowledge on the internet : the taming of information The Internet allows access to information to millions of users. However, the problem lies in screening relevant information from the massive amount of data. Whether its content is relevant or not, the number of documents on the web (updated web sites, obsolete or stable web sites) keeps on increasing. Beside, the fact that they vary in quality and stability, documentary sources accessible through the Internet are not rationally organized. There is no centralized database dedicated to searching and organizing the documents. The web today : « a chaotic digital documents library  » However, a new type of web site has emerged, commonly called gateways or directories. Unlike search engines-which pretend to cover all the existing knowledge fields on the Internet when they actually don’t, those gateways were launched by librarians, information sciences specialists or, more generally, by people specialized in a specific field. 2- Information Sciences and Web services for SBIG value controlled • As they provide information on a specific knowledge field, directories are often named “Subject Based Information Gateway” (SBIG). • SBIG principal features : • Produced by specialists of one or several domains (economics, marketing, biology, medicine, etc.) • According to qualitative criteria, they select, describe, validate and organize access to information • They use library science methods to organize this access to information • QUALITY IS BETTER THAN QUANTITY 3- Chosen meta-criteria • We need some measure tools for the assessment of the informational quality and quantity of the information provided by a document. We did assess many SBIGs according to the following meta-criteria, as in a user approach : • accessibility and ergonomics, • services, library and information sciences. • The number of SBIG tested is 31 gateways. 3.1 Meta-criteria 1 : access and ergonomics • The criteria are access and ergonomics are : • Accessibility : accessibility of the web site • Ergonomics : logical organization of the SBIGs and navigability, presentation, readability • According to our meta-criteria (access + design), the best SBIGs with value controlled are : Bubl, Math Guide, Omni-Biome and EEVL. • BUBL LINK • http://bubl.ac.uk/link/ • CisMef • http://www.chu-rouen.fr/cismef/ • EEVL • http://www.eevl.ac.uk • Math Guide • http://espacemath.com/guide.htm • OMNI Biome • http://biome.ac.uk • SOSIG • http://www.sosig.ac.uk 3.2 Meta-criteria 2 : Services, Library and Information Sciences • The criteria of “services, library + information sciences” are : • Analytic organization of information • Services (lot of access, entries, etc.) • Normalized classification (CDU, Dewey, specialized classification, etc.) • Quality of e-links (validation) • The best SBIGs with value controlled (assessed) according to our meta-criteria are : BUBLE, SOSIG and CisMef. 4- Conclusion The assessment of SBIG demonstrate that compared to search engines and ordinary directories, the gateways present many solutions design for helping the user search specialized documentation on the Internet. The documentary tools add a qualitative value to the gateways dedicated to searching information on the Internet: limitation of irrelevant information in the answers, reliability and time saving. ⇨ SBIG are essential to a structured access to resources : They must combine computer and library sciences for the best. SBIG : a corpus of heterogeneous sites the quality of which has been controlled and validated. ⇨ Perspective for French libraries : a professional systematic revue of knowledge.