Authors
Abstract
Researchers that have analyzed the digital divide complain about the lack of a standard set of indicators, which appropriately measure the digital divide between countries, Their statistics can be collected by the majority of countries and serve as a basis and a standard for internationally comparable information society statistics. In this article, a framework of these indicators, which are called “core indicators of digital divide”, is presented that can narrow the ICT data and statistics divide through formulating standards and synchronizing ICT statistics throughout the world. To extract the core indicators, we are encountering the limitations of the nonexistence of data for some indicators in the majority of countries. Such a limitation does not allow us to apply the statistical methods to extracting the core indicators of digital divide. To overcome this problem, the information and the knowledge of 45 digital divide models were employed as experts' opinions to extract the core indicators. To do so, the entropy method was used and the importance of these models was considered. Finally, comparing the previous global core indicators of digital divide and the proposed ones, it was revealed that the global core indicators ignored three important dimensions: e-learning e-government, and networked world enablers.
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