Towards Topic-Based Trust in Social Networks

The vast majority of applications consider generic notion of trust of a person to others, which is not restricted to any particular context or situation. Motivated by the financial scenario consuming data from distributed sources on the Web, we argue that we (as information consumers) cannot trust the information publishers or authors in general, however, only regarding the particular topics of the consumed data sources. To enable the so-called topic-based trust between users, we (1) propose a mechanism to persist the topic-based trust in a FOAF social network, (2) survey the topic hierarchies suitable for classifying the topics used in the trust model, and (3) propose an algorithm to compute trust with respect to the particular topic.