Veracity Roadmap: Is Big Data Objective, Truthful and Credible?

Authors

Victoria Rubin, University of Western Ontario, Faculty of Information and Media StudiesFollow
Tatiana Lukoianova, The Ohio State UniversityFollow

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

11-2-2013

Volume

24

Issue

1

Journal

Advances In Classification Research Online

First Page

4

URL with Digital Object Identifier

http://doi.org/10.7152/acro.v24i1.14671

Last Page

15

Abstract

This paper argues that big data can possess different characteristics, which affect its quality. Depending on its origin, data processing technologies, and methodologies used for data collection and scientific discoveries, big data can have biases, ambiguities, and inaccuracies which need to be identified and accounted for to reduce inference errors and improve the accuracy of generated insights. Big data veracity is now being recognized as a necessary property for its utilization, complementing the three previously established quality dimensions (volume, variety, and velocity), But there has been little discussion of the concept of veracity thus far. This paper provides a roadmap for theoretical and empirical definitions of veracity along with its practical implications. We explore veracity across three main dimensions: 1) objectivity/subjectivity, 2) truthfulness/deception, 3) credibility/implausibility – and propose to operationalize each of these dimensions with either existing computational tools or potential ones, relevant particularly to textual data analytics. We combine the measures of veracity dimensions into one composite index – the big data veracity index. This newly developed veracity index provides a useful way of assessing systematic variations in big data quality across datasets with textual information. The paper contributes to the big data research by categorizing the range of existing tools to measure the suggested dimensions, and to Library and Information Science (LIS) by proposing to account for heterogeneity of diverse big data, and to identify information quality dimensions important for each big data type.

Notes

Copyright © 2013 Tatiana Lukoianova and Victoria L. Rubin

Citation of this paper:

Lukoianova, T., & Rubin, V. (2014). Veracity Roadmap: Is Big Data Objective, Truthful and Credible?. Advances In Classification Research Online, 24(1), pp.4-15.