The Credibility Commons consists of technical infrastructure and a pool of development capability. Developers will be able to use blogging software to document projects in development, mailing list capabilities to announce new projects and, versioning of software to allow for quick access to projects. The goal is to provide not only computing power, but a community platform to encourage development and deployment of credibility solutions.

Current Projects

While the Commons is seen as an evolving entity, it will begin with a set of well-defined tasks. These tasks are chosen to quickly maximize visibility and utility of the Commons. The guiding principle behind any tool development shall be to build credibility tools that no one calls credibility tools. That is, to first and foremost make tools that have immediate utility to real users.

To this end we have developed a suite of projects.

Reference Extract. A trustworthy search engine that builds upon a set of trusted documents generated by librarians through digital reference transactions.

Search Engine Face-Off. A comparative search tool. Compare search results from Reference Extract with Google and weblogs and vote for the winner.

Credibility Repository. A digital archive of publications related to Internet credibility.

ACE: Automated Credibility Evaluator. A web-based tool that simulates a checklist-based approach to verifying web sites. Use this to determine what trustworthy or untrustworthy signals are being presented on your site.

OpenQA. OpenQA is a web community system that allows people to propose ideas, questions and topics that bloggers can write about. It then collects the responses from users’ blogs and lets you browse and search the results.

Partner Projects

We are also collaborating with partners in research and industry to expand our suite of credibility tools. See our list of current partner projects.