Online Survey on Trust and Interest Similarity

Abstract

A remarkable growth in quantity and popularity of online social networks has been observed in recent years. There is a good number of online social networks existing which have over 100 million registered users. Many of these popular social networks offer automated recommendations to their users. These automated recommendations are normally generated using collaborative filtering systems based on the past ratings or opinions of the similar users. Alternatively, trust among the users in the network also can be used to find the neighbors while making recommendations. To obtain an optimum result, there must be a positive correlation existing between trust and interest similarity. Although a positive relationship between trust and interest similarity is assumed and adopted by many researchers, no survey work on real life people’s opinions to support this hypothesis was found. This chapter presents the result of the survey on the relationship between trust and interest similarity. The result supports the assumed hypothesis of a positive relationship between the trust and interest similarity of the users.