Title: Task-dependence of subjective believability in integration of scientific data

Authors: Ahmed Abuhalimeh; M. Eduard Tudoreanu; Thikra Mustafa

Addresses: IQ Programme, University of Arkansas at Little Rock, 2801 South University Avenue, Little Rock, AR 72204, USA. ' Information Science, University of Arkansas at Little Rock, 2801 South University Avenue, Little Rock, AR 72204, USA. ' Nanotechnology Centre, University of Arkansas at Little Rock, 2801 South University Avenue, Little Rock, AR 72204, USA

Abstract: Believability is one of the major information quality dimensions that plays a role in the operational fitness and sound decision making. This paper presents an empirical evaluation of how people perceive believability of data shown through visual and textual representations. Integration of text and images is also studied with respect to believability. The subjective assessment exhibits variation for different types of data sources: textual, image, and both. The manner in which believability varies appears to be heavily dependent on task. Some tasks are more believable when text is integrated with images, others do not benefit from the combination. The results may be influenced by possible bias towards particular data. The data is the result of scientific research into the process of incubation of the bone cells with gold nanoparticles. This research was selected for our study because it alleviates the effect of the accuracy dimension on the assessment of believability. These results are complemented by previous studies on subjective perception of accuracy, and show a non-linear perception of information quality.

Keywords: believability; subjective quality; data quality; information quality; visualisation integration; data integration; scientific data; data perception; text; images; incubation; bone cells; gold nanoparticles; nanotechnology; biomedical engineering; bioengineering; task dependence.

DOI: 10.1504/IJIQ.2012.050038

International Journal of Information Quality, 2012 Vol.3 No.1, pp.71 - 84

Received: 05 Mar 2012
Accepted: 16 Jul 2012
Published online: 13 Sep 2014 *