Towards Trust in Web Content Using Semantic Web Technologies

Abstract

Abstract. Since the amount of user-generated content has been sharply increasing in recent years, mainly due to Web 2.0 technology and effects of social networking, it is necessary to build mechanisms to assess the reliability of the content. On the web this notion of trust is a key ingredient for an effective manipulation of knowledge on a (world-wide) web scale. The web of trust has thus become an important research area both for web science and semantic web. In the PhD research we have laid out for us, we focus on the notion of trust and methods for representing and computing trust of users in the web content. This paper outlines the vision at the start of the PhD period on the research problem and the semantic web-based approach to solve that problem.

Semantic web and decision support systems

“…The familiarity with the technological features and communication tools of social media, or satisfaction with past interactions with other community members, are much more important antecedents for online trust than mere acquaintance or friendship (Grabner-Kräuter, 2009). 35 Nevertheless, semantic web reasoners, agents, and other automated systems can enhance trust judgments, by enabling the detection of related statements, and whether they are contradictory (Gil & Artz, 2007), thus enhancing the trustworthiness of web content by analysing their semantic relationship (Gao, 2010) and also to structure web content in order to extract or perceive the implicit argumentation liaisons. The unstructured nature of decision-making is very well suited for the ad hoc nature of social networking based on different tools (Nagle & Pope, 2013), depending on the problem at hand, with users organising information according to the problem itself, 5 rather than a preformatted way of collaboration that might not be appropriate for every single case.…”