Abstract
Semantic Web endeavors have mainly focused on issues pertaining to knowledge representation and ontology design. However, besides understanding information metadata stated by subjects, knowing about their credibility becomes equally crucial. Hence, trust and trust metrics, conceived as computational means to evaluate trust relationships between individuals, come into play. Our major contribution to Semantic Web trust management through this work is twofold. First, we introduce a classification scheme for trust metrics along various axes and discuss advantages and drawbacks of existing approaches for Semantic Web scenarios. Hereby, we devise an advocacy for local group trust metrics, guiding us to the second part which presents Appleseed, our novel proposal for local group trust computation. Compelling in its simplicity, Appleseed borrows many ideas from spreading activation models in psychology and relates their concepts to trust evaluation in an intuitive fashion. Moreover, we provide extensions for the Appleseed nucleus that make our trust metric handle distrust statements.
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Cai-Nicolas Ziegler is a post-doctoral researcher at DBIS, the Databases and Information Systems group of the University of Freiburg, Germany. He studied Computer Science at the University of Passau, Germany, and Université Laval, Québec, receiving his Diploma (equivalent to MSc) in 2003. Cai-Nicolas obtained his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Freiburg in 2005.
His primary research interests cover collaborative filtering applications and recommender systems, as well as computational trust models on the verge of human-computer interaction.
Georg Lausen is head of the research group on Databases and Information Systems (DBIS) at the University of Freiburg, Germany. He received his Diploma in Industrial Engineering in 1978, PhD in 1982, and his postdoctoral lecture qualification (Habilitation) in 1985 from the University of Karlsruhe (TH). He was associate professor for Information Technology and Integration Problems at the Technical University of Darmstadt from 1986 to 1987. From 1987 to 1994 he was full professor for databases and informations systems at the University of Mannheim, and since 1994 at the University of Freiburg.
His current research interests comprise information integration, internet technologies, and Web services.
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Ziegler, CN., Lausen, G. Propagation Models for Trust and Distrust in Social Networks. Inf Syst Front 7, 337–358 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10796-005-4807-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10796-005-4807-3