The METHOD workshop aims to bring together researchers working on the problem of trust and quality assessment of (open) data, and all components that contribute to this goal. It provides a forum for researchers from both the Semantic Web and the Trust Management community, with the goal of gaining new insights towards solutions for this complex problem. Due to the relatively low number of submissions, and to maximize the impact of the accepted papers, METHOD 2014 merged with the 10th International Workshop on Uncertainty Reasoning for the Semantic Web (URSW), as a special session. In this short editorial paper, we provide an overview of the topics discussed during this session.
Trust assessment of content on the Web is a highly complex concept that depends on objective as well as subjective criteria, including the content's provenance, data quality estimation, and also the consumer's background, personality, and context. However, the exact criteria and tolerances di er for each context and for each assessor, requiring detailed knowledge about the data and its uses. This also makes it very challenging to nd generic solutions and assessments that are applicable everywhere or transferrable from one context to another. Therefore, stakeholders in this eld are continuously investigating new techniques to handle and prepare data in such a way that it becomes easier for machines to process it with the goal of trust and/or quality assessment. The METHOD workshop is a venue for presenting and discussing novel research ideas in this eld, as well as technical applications.
2014 is the third year for METHOD. The two previous editions were held in conjunction with the IEEE Annual International Computer Software & Applications Conference (COMPSAC). This year, the workshop is held for the rst time at ISWC, since the topics of provenance, data quality, and trust are highly relevant to the Semantic Web community. The diversity in the ways that these topics may be approached is also visible judging from the subject of the submissions we received. Although only three papers were accepted, each submission covers a distinctly di erent aspect of the general theme of the workshop. 2
This year's submissions cover the following aspects of trust of (open) data: content rating, data quality rewarding, data attribution, and trust representation.
The rst two aspects are covered by Couto, who proposes a number of
guidelines for a system that rates as well as rewards good practices in data sharing,
by means of a virtual currency [
Despite the diverse aspects discussed in the submissions, a number of common themes and open questions can be identi ed, listed below.
{ What incentive is there for data creators to make their data trustworthy? { Which mechanisms are in place to attribute data to its creators and editors, and do they su ce for our needs? { How can we estimate ratings or assessments of data quality and trustworthiness? { How would it be possible to allow the reuse of such trust and quality estimations? { How do we represent the aforementioned aspects in an interoperable way? These are the questions we hope to see addressed during the discussions at METHOD 2014, and in future editions of the workshop.