Developing a Web Credibility Evaluation Tool Using PROMETHEE Method

Abstract

In recent years, the Internet has become an indispensable way for users to find information which is almost instantaneously available. However, the presence of information on different websites makes the user needs to pre-check the credibility of the selected websites. Most users find it difficult to assess website credibility in terms of its particular characteristics or factors. Accordingly, we proposed an automated evaluation tool which considers various factors to assess the credibility of different websites and rank them from the highest credibility score to the lowest in order to allow the user to select the most credible website. We used the Preference Ranking Organization Method for Enrichment Evaluations (PROMOTHEE). The latter is one of the Multi-Criteria Decision Making methods (MCDM). It combines pairwise comparison and outranking methods in order to give more accurate and superior credibility scores due to its enrichment evaluations. For the proposed tool to be acceptable, we carried out a correlation analysis to determine the coefficient of correlation between human judges and the proposed tool. We found the coefficient of correlation rho is 0.943 which indicates that there is a strong correlation between the human judges’ ranking and the ranking given by the proposed website evaluation tool.