SocialTrust++: Building community-based trust in Social Information Systems

Social information systems - popularized by Facebook, Wikipedia, Twitter, and other social websites - are emerging as a powerful new paradigm for distributed social-powered information management. While there has been growing interest in these systems by businesses, government agencies, and universities, there remain important open challenges that must be addressed if the potential of these social systems is to be fully realized. For example, the presence of poor quality users and users intent on manipulating the system can disrupt the quality of socially-powered information and knowledge sharing applications. In this paper, we outline the SocialTrust++ project at Texas A&M University. The overall research goal of the SocialTrust++ project is to develop, analyze, deploy, and test algorithms for building, enabling, and leveraging community-based trust in Social Information Systems. Concretely, we are developing a trustworthy community-based information platform so that each user in a Social Information System can have transparent access to the community's trust perspective to enable more effective and efficient social information access.