Towards content trust of web resources

Abstract

Trust is an integral part of the Semantic Web architecture. Most prior work on trust focuses on entity-centered issues such as authentication and reputation and does not take into account the content, i.e. the nature and use of the information being exchanged. This paper defines content trust and discusses it in the context of other trust measures that have been previously studied. We introduce several factors that users consider in deciding whether to trust the content provided by a Web resource. Our goal is to discern which of these factors could be captured in practice with minimal user interaction in order to maximize the quality of the system's trust estimates. We present results on a study to determine which factors were more important to capture, and describe a simulation environment that we have designed to study alternative models of content trust.

Determining the Trustworthiness of New Electronic Contracts

“…Content-based trust, the trust in artifacts from the artifacts themselves, is a relatively neglected area compared with mechanisms to assess trust in other agents (reviewed recently, for example, by Sabater and Sierra [19], Ruohomaa and Kutvonen [18]). Determining content-based trust was identified as an open issue by Gil and Artz in the context of the Semantic Web [8]. Content-based trust is crucially important, given that the web can be understood as a network of documents whose content people judge trustworthy or otherwise based on various factors, including context, popularity, appearance, provenance, apparent bias, etc.…”

“…However, another trust judgment must be made in addition: one must also trust the contract itself [8], to believe that, for example, it correctly specifies terms of service, appropriately deals with exceptional cases, is sufficiently stringent that actions will be taken if obligations are not fulfilled. For a phone contract, the customer might look for a statement on when support will be available, whether there is an indemnification portion of the contract, or even whether the contract is presented on paper with an attractive letterhead (indicating professionalism by the provider).…”

DC Proposal: Evaluating Trustworthiness of Web Content Using Semantic Web Technologies

“…It also is used by machines to process this metadata in order to provide trust information to users. With this feature, less effort is needed on the side of humans than if they were to manually assess the trustworthiness of the information themselves [12,4]. RDF provides an opportunity to produce an effective trust model which uses metadata that is available in the Semantic Web for evaluating the trustworthiness or credibility of Web content.…”

“…The concept of content trust was first proposed by Gil and Artz [4]. They defined content trust as "a trust judgement on a particular piece of information or some specific content provided by an entity in a given context".…”

“…They also described the factors which influence a user's decision on whether to trust content on the Web. Moreover, they introduced the content trust model, which solves the problem of assessing the reliability of Web resources, by inferring the trustworthiness of the content of these Web resources [4]. Their work proposed the preliminary concept of content trust which can be explored more to produce a reasonable model.…”