Trust Evaluation through User Reputation and Provenance Analysis

Trust is a broad concept which, in many systems, is reduced to reputation estimation. However, reputation is just one way of determining trust. The estimation of trust can be tackled from other perspectives as well, including by looking at provenance. In this work, we look at the combination of reputation and provenance to determine trust values. Concretely, the first contribution of this paper is a standard procedure for computing reputation-based trust assessments. The second is a procedure for computing trust values based on provenance information, represented by means of the W3C standard model PROV. Finally, we demonstrate how merging the results of these two procedures can be beneficial for the reliability of the estimated trust value. We evaluate our procedures and hypothesis by estimating and verifying the trustworthiness of the tags created within the Waisda? video tagging game, launched by the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision. Within Waisda?, tag trustworthiness is estimated on the basis of user consensus. Hence, we first provide a means to represent user consensus in terms of trust values, and then we predict the trustworthiness of tags based on reputation, provenance and a combination of the two. Through a quantitative analysis of the results, we demonstrate that using provenance information is beneficial for the accuracy of trust assessments.