Reaching Consensus in Digital Libraries: A Linguistic Approach

Abstract

Libraries are recently changing their classical role of providing stored information into new virtual communities, which involve large number of users sharing real time information. Despite of those good features, there is still a necessity of developing tools to help users to reach decisions with a high level of consensus in those new virtual environments. In this contribution we present a new consensus reaching tool with linguistic preferences designed to minimize the main problems that this kind of organization presents (low and intermittent participation rates, difficulty of establishing trust relations and so on) while incorporating the benefits that a new digital library offers (rich and diverse knowledge due to a large number of users, real-time communication and so on). The tool incorporates some delegation and feedback mechanisms to improve the speed of the process and its convergence towards a consensual solution.