Abstract
On-line platforms foster the communication capabilities of the Internet to develop large-scale influence networks in which the quality of the interactions can be evaluated based on trust and reputation. So far, this technology is well known for building trust and harnessing cooperation in on-line marketplaces, such as Amazon (www.amazon.com) and eBay (www.ebay.es). However, these mechanisms are poised to have a broader impact on a wide range of scenarios, from large scale decision making procedures, such as the ones implied in e-democracy, to trust based recommendations on e-health context or influence and performance assessment in e-marketing and e-learning systems. This contribution surveys the progress in understanding the new possibilities and challenges that trust and reputation systems pose. To do so, it discusses trust, reputation and influence which are important measures in networked based communication mechanisms to support the worthiness of information, products, services opinions and recommendations. The existent mechanisms to estimate and propagate trust and reputation, in distributed networked scenarios, and how these measures can be integrated in decision making to reach consensus among the agents are analysed. Furthermore, it also provides an overview of the relevant work in opinion dynamics and influence assessment, as part of social networks. Finally, it identifies challenges and research opportunities on how the so called trust based network can be leveraged as an influence measure to foster decision making processes and recommendation mechanisms in complex social networks scenarios with uncertain knowledge, like the mentioned in e-health and e-marketing frameworks.
Highlights
Virtual interactions between people and services without any previous real world relationship have experienced an exponential increase with the availability of interactive on line sites, including the so called social networks
Nowadays on-line services and communities play a prominent role in people’s life, from communication and buying purposes to advice seeking for decision making, or recommendations
The inherent anonymity and open architecture of these systems make difficult for the users to build trust relations among their peers in the network
Summary
Virtual interactions between people and services without any previous real world relationship have experienced an exponential increase with the availability of interactive on line sites, including the so called social networks. In spite of the diversity of the available on-line communities, all of them share the common characteristic of having a vast amount of users interacting between each other under a virtual identity These emerging social media channels permit users to build various explicit or implicit social relationships, to leverage the network as a worldwide showcase to disseminate and share products, services, information, opinions and recommendations. In these digital media scenarios, the evaluation of the credibility of the information constitutes a more challenging problem than in conventional media, because of its inherent anonymous, open nature that is characterised by a lack of strong governance structures [23]. It is necessary to use mechanisms that allow to choose the peers from whom interact as well as effectively identify and isolate the malicious ones
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