Trust and Provenance in the Semantic Web

The advent of Semantic Web has made a vast amount of machine understandable information available on the Web. The role of semantics in integrating this vast amount of heterogeneous and distributed data is critical to realizing actionable information.1 Given the open nature of standards and the low barriers associated with information publication, new techniques have to be employed to validate the quality of information. Knowledge of the source of information is always valuable in establishing the trust one can place on the information. However, only knowledge about the source of some information is of limited value if we cannot ascertain the trust we can associate with the content of the source, say content of a document. Lack of first hand information about the content of the source of some information brings in the notion of peer opinions or peer beliefs in the content and ones’ trust in peers.