Adaptive Quality Control of Web Resources

The web is a comprehensive and dynamic repository of information regarding most of the areas of human knowledge. However, retrieving information from the web is not an easy task. Web´s characteristics place many difficulties to users willing to explore it as an information source. Information retrieved from the web is usually very extensive, composed of voluminous collections of hypertext documents. Taking advantage of the intrinsic value present in this huge resource requires to organize relevant information according to specific needs. When organizing web resources to satisfy persistent information needs, some evaluation scheme is required to measure the system performance, as perceived by users. The resource quality might be continuously measured, allowing for automatic corrections if and when significant deviations are detected. This adaptive quality control framework may also detect and follow drift in user information needs. We propose to evaluate and control resources´ global quality based on a three-dimensional space with dimensions representing Automation, Efficacy and Efficiency. Each dimension in this space aggregates a set of measures, relevant to the resource´s global quality. The quality of the system is permanently monitored, the system periodically measures and stores the values of its quality parameters. This quality framework has been partially evaluated on two web resources.