Civilization has always been heavily dependent on information. The fates of people of every nature and position have been determined, directly or indirectly, by outcomes from the use of good or bad information. Decisions were made and history was written.
Every moment of every day we process information. Most of this is unconscious, instinctive, environmental and situational. But we also continually and actively seek information to ingest, analyze, and learn. You are doing that now. How will you determine whether it’s worth your attention? Whether it’s of interest is one factor. Whether it’s judged to be valid is another.
Establishing the validity of information can be intuitive in many cases. We use common sense and experience to know that it “sounds right”. But to objectively determine whether information is correct we must have a means to define and measure its properties. There are thousands of books on various methods to accomplish this for equally as many areas of application.
In this issue we have chosen topics to give readers a sampling of the issues involved and the variety of challenges which exist. From the very topical problems of “Trusting the Internet” and “Enhancing the Selection of Web Sources,” to the broader issues of “Evaluating and Improving Information Quality” and “Making Sense of Technical Information Quality,” to the more pragmatic problem of “Improving the Quality of Earned Value Management Information.”
Hopefully, this issue will achieve the recursive goal of providing worthy and useful, quality information.