An Ontology-Supported Misinformation Model: Toward a Digital Misinformation Library

The importance of research on misinformation has received wide recognition. Two major challenges faced by this research community are the lack of theoretical models and the scarcity of misinformation in support of such research. This paper aims to address the aforementioned challenges by conceptualizing misinformation and enabling the interoperability of misinformation. In particular, a representation and a model of misinformation are proposed through surveying, synthesizing, and explicating existing work in the field. Moreover, ontology is used to represent the proposed model. The ontology-supported misinformation model can not only guide future misinformation research but also lay the foundation for building a digital misinformation library by advancing our knowledge on misinformation and by improving its sharing, management, and reuse. In addition, we present a formal methodology for managing misinformation in a digital library, and suggest future research directions related to the misinformation model.