Mining the online infosphere: A survey

TL;DR

This survey reviews the growth, challenges, and future directions of the online infosphere, emphasizing collaborative systems, scientific impact, and governance issues like hate speech and bias in online platforms.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of research on the online infosphere, highlighting technical challenges, solutions, and future research directions.

Findings

Collaborative systems like Wikipedia foster knowledge sharing.

The infosphere significantly influences scientific collaboration and citation networks.

Governance issues such as hate speech and bias are critical challenges.

Abstract

The evolution of AI-based system and applications had pervaded everyday life to make decisions that have momentous impact on individuals and society. With the staggering growth of online data, often termed as the Online Infosphere it has become paramount to monitor the infosphere to ensure social good as the AI-based decisions are severely dependent on it. The goal of this survey is to provide a comprehensive review of some of the most important research areas related to infosphere, focusing on the technical challenges and potential solutions. The survey also outlines some of the important future directions. We begin by discussions focused on the collaborative systems that have emerged within the infosphere with a special thrust on Wikipedia. In the follow up we demonstrate how the infosphere has been instrumental in the growth of scientific citations and collaborations thus fueling interdisciplinary research. Finally, we illustrate the issues related to the governance of the infosphere such as the tackling of the (a) rising hateful and abusive behavior and (b) bias and discrimination in different online platforms and news reporting.