Toward Formal Reasoning with Epistemic Policies about Information Quality in the Twittersphere Brian Ulicny Mieczyslaw M. Kokar VIStology, Inc Department of Electrical and Computer Framingham, MA, U.S.A. Engineering
[email protected] Northeastern University Boston, MA, USA
[email protected] Abstract – Some recent systems have had success in ‘@’. Users can annotate a message by topic with a producing an accurate awareness of situations by hashtag: a folksonomy term prepended with ‘#’. Users mining traffic in Twitter. Where these systems have can subscribe to the messages of other users by following been successful, there has been no issue of evaluating them. Users can send private messages to someone who Twitter streams for source reliability and information follows them by by prefixing their message with ‘DM’ credibility because the situations have not been (direct message) and the username. Users typically adversarial. Recent uses of Twitter in political dissent in shorten URLs in their tweets via various services (e.g. the Mideast makes the need for computationally bit.ly) to maximize the 140-character message length. tractable approaches to evaluating source reliability and These shortened URLs are unique to the originating information credibility more acute in order to achieve message. Users can also retweet a message, indicating accurate situation awareness on the basis of Twitter whom it came from by simply prepending the message streams in the face of deliberate mis- or disinformation with ‘RT’ and the originators username. Users can efforts. automatically associate a geolocation with their message if their phone or other device supports this, and they turn Keywords: Twitter; soft data fusion; situation awareness; this option on.