Collaborative Knowledge Fusion by Ad-Hoc Information Distribution in Crowds

We study situations where (such as in a city festival) in the case of a phone signal outage cell phones can communicate opportunistically (for instance, using WiFi or Bluetooth) and we want to understand and control information spreading. A particular question is, how to prevent false information from spreading, and how to facilitate the spreading of useful (true) information? We introduce collaborative knowledge fusion as the operation by which individual knowledge claims are “merged”. Such fusion events are necessarily local, e.g. happen upon the physical meetings of knowledge providers. We study and evaluate different methods for collaborative knowledge fusion and study the conditions for and tradeoffs of the convergence to a global true knowledge state under various conditions.