A Novel Trust Computing System for Social Networks

Trust is a phenomenon that is exclusively possessed by human beings. Due to its human-related properties, trust is difficult to be uniformly defined or even be precisely described. As a research field, trust has been intensively focused on exploring propagations and usefulness in social networks. Little research work has been found on simulating trust itself. In this paper, we present a trust computing system to tackle the problem of trust simulation. The system is capable of simulating trust between two directly connected individuals on social networks. By integrating the trust values computed through three trust computing components, the system eventually returns a trust score representing the actual trust magnitude from one particular individual to the other. To our best knowledge, this is the first effort that such a trust computing system is proposed.