Title: Building trust in electronic communities by mining web content

Authors: Yu Zhang, Huajun Chen, Chaolun Xia, Xiaohong Jiang

Addresses: College of Computer Science, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310027, China. ' College of Computer Science, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310027, China. ' College of Computer Science, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310027, China. ' College of Computer Science, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310027, China

Abstract: Most previous trust mechanisms mainly focus on reputation or authentication issues, which do not consider the large amount of system-provided and user-generated content published on web. In this paper, we propose to build trust in online community by mining web content. We first pinpoint several trust characteristics which have been overlooked previously. Then, we introduce trust reasoning functions to infer trust relationships among users. Last, we present several trust strategies and illustrate how to calculate trust values through social network. Although we choose Epinions as our example, the mechanisms proposed in this paper are also applicable to other electronic applications.

Keywords: electronic community; trust reasoning; web content; web mining; data mining; online community; trust relationships; social networks.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCSE.2010.030230

International Journal of Computational Science and Engineering, 2010 Vol.5 No.1, pp.58 - 67

Published online: 11 Dec 2009 *

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