IBIS Community

Wisdom of the subject matter experts

The strength of IBIS lays in the community of people using it. IBIS is constructed on dialog, people’s knowledge and their expertise of a particular subject matter. That can be shared online, using IBIS as a tool. With the development of the internet and online collaboration, a new practice emerged, called crowdsourcing. The practice of obtaining needed services, ideas, or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people and especially from the online community rather than from traditional employees or suppliers is what crowdsourcing means.
Access here more information on crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing is used to produce collective intelligence.

The contributors for IBIS are: members, article evaluators, search editors and moderators.

The IBIS Social Pyramid by ©EugeneGeorgiades2014

Members

Members of IBIS receive a daily digest, and, according to their preferences, are able to personalise the start page of IBIS, so that it displays articles which matches their interest. They can also submit articles and links to articles to the IBIS community.
Click here to access the member’s page.

Article Evaluators

Article Evaluators are the subject matter experts on which IBIS bases its knowledge pool gathering.
Without human evaluation, no relevant information can go into the daily digest or the alert system. Article Evaluators have technical background in aquatic, plant or terrestrial/animal diseases.
Article Evaluators look at the articles in the “Keep” pool and evaluate articles they consider should be brougt to the attention of the community; if an article is “promoted”, it will appear in the daily digest.
Please feel free to any article that you consider important and of relevance to your monitored field/ threat.
ALERTS: Each alert is also sent via e-mail to EVERYONE in the community, please make sure that when you send an alert it is relevant to the wider community. Have a look here for what makes an alert.
Click here to access the article evaluator’s page.

Search Editors

Search editors can edit

  • information sources,
  • pests, diseases, hosts and qualifiers as well as
  • search queries.

They also have the ability to evaluate articles – so or send them as ALERTS.

They can add articles to issues and can create/ add articles to Issues on the Dashboard.
Click here to access the search editor’s page

Moderators

Moderators make sure that IBIS runs smoothly in the background. They are also doing the analysis work.
They maintain:
  • Information sources: Mining the relevant information sources, along with having good search queries is what makes IBIS effective. If you have a particular journal or any other information source that you think you may wish to see included please let us know. We will add it to the search pool.
  • Pests/Diseases, Hosts and Qualifiers: These are the subjects of the search queries. The so called “crawlers” or “spiders” will search the www for relevant information which is based on the pests, diseases, hosts or qualifiers or a combination of these.
  • Search queries: These bring relevant information into IBIS’s pool. Sometimes the information is from untrusted sources. A moderator has to go through every raw feed to triage the relevant articles. Once that is done, relevant articles are sent into the “Keep” pool.
  • Users: Moderators approve and allocate permissions to the rest of the IBIS’s users.