Trust-based Improved Recommendation of IT-related Web Resources

The explosive growth of the Web makes increasingly harder to identify relevant resources among large result sets yield by search engines. Researcher looking for specialized documents have little guidance beyond the documents' own metadata. This article describes the use of trust-based computing to improve ranking and relevance of results by combining topic-specific trust among community members and individual's resources evaluation. The approach has been prototyped with Antu, built over the IT-specific faceted keyword-based search tool Yarquen. An experimental study was conducted with informatics graduate students, and found improved relevance of the suggested documents. This result suggests that trust-based approaches have huge potential to improve recommendations in specialized communities.