An organization depends on quality information for effective operations and decision-making. However, fundamental questions still remain as to how quality should be defined and the specific criteria that should be used to evaluate information quality. Previous work adopted either an intuitive, empirical, or theoretical approach to address this problem; however, we believe that an integrated research approach is required to ensure both rigour and scope. This paper presents an information quality framework based on semiotic theory, the linguistic theory of sign-based communication, to describe the form-, meaning-, and use-related aspects of information. This provides a sound theoretical basis both for defining quality categories, previously defined in an ad-hoc manner, based on these different information aspects and for integrating the different research approaches required to derive quality criteria for each category. The goal of our work is to provide an approach to defining information quality that is both theoretically grounded and practical that can serve as a basis for further research in data quality assessment and decision support.

This paper presents an in-depth overview of existing literature in the area of assessing data / information quality. I have also come across two other papers that provide a comprehensive overview of data / information quality research - A Semiotic Information Quality Framework: Development and Comparative Analysis and Developing a Framework for Assessing Information Quality on the World Wide Web. The authors propose that existing research has adopted a intuitive, empirical, or theoretical research approach and argue for the integration of these approaches in developing a information quality framework to ensure its rigour and scope.

Semiotic can be defined as the study of signs in terms of its logical components. These logical components include the sign's actual representation, its' referent (intended meaning) and the interpretation of the sign (received meaning). The authors employ the semiotic theory to develop a semiotic information quality framework as a foundation to (1) derive and define quality categories, (2) classify and derive quality criteria, and, (3) integrate different research approaches to derive quality criteria. Although such a framework is useful in assessing information quality within an organisation / information systems, I'm not sure whether it is applicable in assessing the quality of user generated content (UGC) in online communities. To the best of my knowledge, current work in assessing UGC quality has predominately adopted heuristic research approaches and lately I have been searching for more theoretical based research in this area but have so far been unsuccessful.

• Semiotic theory
• Syntactic, semantic and pragmatic semiotic levels and quality categories
• Service quality theory