Inferring Reputation on the Semantic Web

The so-called "Web of Trust" is one of the ultimate goals of the Semantic Web. Research on the topic of trust in this domain has focused largely on digital signatures, certificates, and authentication. More social notions of trust which are reputation based are beginning to gain some attention in their own right, but have been traditionally overlooked. In this paper, we describe an algorithm for generating locallycalculated reputation ratings from a semantic network. We present mathematical and experimental results that show the effectiveness of this algorithm to accurately infer the reputation of a node. We then describe TrustMail, an application that uses the network for rating relevant emails CATEGORIES AND SUBJECT DESCRIPTORS I.2.4 [Artificial Intelligence]: Knowledge Representation Formalisms and Methods – semantic networks.