Context-aware social computing: A cognitive approach

The Internet is a perfectly distributed and uncontrolled medium. However, the use of this technology to its utmost boundaries requires robust and efficient trust mechanisms. This paper describes a context-sensitive trust management system, in which a rule-based reasoner is used to assess the trustability of the trustee on the basis of available historical information. The rules are automatically extracted from the history and encoded as conditions connecting contextual information to trust judgments. Through the use of subjective logic, this method explicitly incorporates uncertainty, thereby making it suitable in situations of partial ignorance and imperfect information. Although our method is suggested for online trust and reputation systems, it may also be applied for any other system that uses ratings such as recommender systems. We give an example of implementation of our proposal for a large-scale recommender system as well.