Web of Trust: An approach towards Semantic based Social Networks

In many computing systems, information is produced and processed by many people. Knowing how much a user trusts a source can be very useful for aggregating, filtering and ordering of information. Furthermore, if trust is used to support decision making, it is important to have an accurate estimate of trust when it is not directly available, as well as a measure of confidence in that estimate. Much research has focused on authentication of resources, including work on digital signatures and public keys. Confidence in the source or author of a document is important, but trust, in this sense, ignores many important points. Just because a person can confirm the source of documents does not have any explicit implication about trusting the content of those documents. For social systems, both models have been used to describe phenomena such as scientific collaboration networks and models of game theory. The propagation of effects through these types of networks has been studied, particularly with respect to the spread of disease. The web itself has shown the patterns of a small world network, in clustering and diameter. Viewing the current web as a graph, where each page represents a node and the-113-hyperlinks translate to directed edges between nodes, has produced some interesting results. Yolanda Gil and Varun Ratnakar addressed the issue of trusting content and information sources [74]. They describe an approach to