Trusting data quality in cooperative information systems

Managing the quality of exchanged data is a relevant problem in any cooperative information system. If the quality of exchanged data is not known, the cooperation itself is negatively affected; indeed, an organization can prefer not requiring data at all, rather than receiving bad quality data. Therefore, there is the need of providing mechanisms to certify organizations with respect to the quality of data that they spread in the cooperative system. This paper describes a model for trusting cooperating organizations. In such a model, a trust value is assigned to each organization with respect to a specific data, category. A set of experiments shows the effectiveness of the model. Moreover, the design of an architectural service that rates organizations on the basis of such model is also described.