Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

A framework for classifying trust for online systems

  • Published:
World Wide Web Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

There is no single universally agreed definition of trust for online systems. This has resulted in various trust metrics being proposed by researchers with diverse methods of computing and sourcing trust information. Consequently, it becomes difficult to carry out a comparative study of different types of trust in an organized manner. A classification framework of trust research is required to understand research trends and gaps in existing research. Existing trust classification frameworks are based on few dimensions and have restricted scope. There is a need for developing a generic and scalable method of classifying online trust approaches that can serve as a framework for researchers to analyze upcoming works and carry them forward. In this paper, we develop an open, extensible and scalable trust classification framework built on a set of orthogonal trust dimensions. After taking a bird’s eye view of existing trust classifications, we use wide applicability and extensibility as guidelines to incorporate and extend some of the existing trust categories and propose new dimensions for developing a more comprehensive classification framework. We enhance the prior proposed dimensions computational approach, computational model, trust inference, genesis of trust and trust context by adding new trust categories within each of them. We introduce a new classification dimension that is based on the life cycle maturity of trust systems. Taking a cue from the study of offline trust in social sciences, we refine implicit trust into two new sub-branches namely, relational and similarity based. We categorize existing works on online trust within the proposed framework to highlight their properties along different trust dimensions. Finally, we present a comprehensive review of similarity based implicit and relational implicit trust metrics, the two new key trust sub-categories defined in this paper.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Figure 1
Figure 2

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. Adali, S., Escriva, R., Goldberg, M.K., Hayvanovych, M., Magdon-Ismail, M., Szymanski, B. K., Wallace, W.A., Williams, G. T.: Measuring behavioral trust in social networks. In: IEEE International Conference on Intelligence and Security Informatics (ISI), P 150–152 (2010)

  2. Artz, D., Gil, Y.: A survey of trust in computer science and the semantic web. Web Semant. 5(2), 58–71 (2007)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  3. Avesani, P., Massa, P., Tiella, R.: A trust enhanced recommender system application: Moleskiing. In: Proceedings of ACM SAC, P 1589–1593 (2005)

  4. Bauman, A., Bachmann, R.: Online consumer trust: trends in research. J. Technol. Manag. Innov. 12(2), 68–79 (2017)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Bobadilla, J., Ortega, F., Hernando, A., Gutiérrez, A.: Recommender systems survey. Knowl.-Based Syst. 46, 109–132 (2013)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  6. Bonatti, P. A., Shahmehri, N., Duma, C., Olmedilla, D., Nejdl, W., Baldoni, M., Baroglio, C., Martelli, A., Patti, V., Coraggio, P., Antoniou, G., Peer, J., and Fuchs, N. E.: Rule-based policy specification: State of the art and future work. Technical Report Project deliverable D1, Working Group I2, EU NoE REWERSE, (2004)

  7. Chakraverty, S., Yadav, A., Sibal, R.: On evaluating the effectiveness of rating similarity-based trust. Soc. Netw. Anal. Min. 6(1), 98:1–98:13, (2016)

  8. Dwyer, C., Hiltz, S. R., Passerini, K.: Trust and privacy concern within social networking sites: a comparison of facebook and myspace. In: Proceedings of the 13th Americas Conference on Information Systems (2007)

  9. Faloutsos, M., Karagiannis, T., Moon, S.: Online social networks. IEEE Netw. 24(5), 4–5 (2010)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  10. Golbeck, J.A.: Computing and applying trust in web-based social networks, Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Maryland, College Park, ISBN:0–542–18324-2 (2005)

  11. Golbeck, J.: Trust on the world wide web: a survey. Found. Trends Web Sci. 1(2), 131–197 (2006)

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  12. Golbeck, J.: Trust and nuanced profile similarity in online social networks. ACM Trans. Web (TWEB). 3, 1–33 (2009)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  13. Grandison, T., Sloman, M.: A survey of trust in internet applications. IEEE Commun. Surv. Tutorials. 3, 2–16 (2000)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  14. Guha, R., Kumar, R., Raghavan, P., Tomkins, A.: Propagation of trust and distrust. Proceedings of the 13th Annual International World Wide Web Conference, New York (2003)

  15. Guo L., Ma J., Chen Z.: Learning to recommend with multi-Faceted trust in social networks. In: Proceedings of the WWW, ACM, New York, pp. 205–206 (2013)

  16. Guo, G., Zhang, J., Thalmann, D., Basu, A., and Yorke-Smith, N.: From ratings to trust: an empirical study of implicit trust in recommender systems. Symposium on Applied Computing-Recommender Systems (2014)

  17. Hendrikx, F., Bubendorfer, K., Chard, R.: Reputation systems: a survey and taxonomy. J. Parallel Distrib. Comput. 75, 184–197. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpdc.2014.08.004

  18. Huberman, B.A., Romero, D.M., Wu, F.: Social networks that matter: twitter under the microscope, First Monday, 14(1) (2009)

  19. Hwang, C. S., Chen, Y. P.: Using trust in collaborative filtering recommendation. In: New Trends in Applied Artificial Intelligence (2007)

  20. Jones, S.: TRUST-EC: requirements for trust and confidence in E-Commerce, European Commission, Joint Research Centre (1999)

  21. Jøsang, A., Ismail, R.: The beta reputation system. 15th Bled Electronic Commerce Conference e-Reality, Constructing the e-Economy (2002)

  22. Jøsang, A., Ismail, R., Boyd, C.: A survey of trust and reputation systems for online service provision. Decis. Support. Syst. 43(2), 618–644 (2007)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  23. Kamvar, S. D., Schlosser, M. T., Garcia-Molina, H.: The Eigen trust algorithm for reputation management in p2p networks. In; Proceedings of the 12th international conference on World Wide Web, p 640–651 (2003)

  24. Kini, A., Choobineh, J.: Trust in electronic commerce: definition and theoretical considerations. 31st Annual Hawaii Int’l. Conf. System Sciences (1998)

  25. Lathia, N., Hailes, S., Capra, L.: Trust-based collaborative filtering. In: IFIP international federation of information processing, vol 263, Trust Management II, springer, p 119-134 (2008)

  26. Lee, D. H., Brusilovsky, P.: Does trust influence information similarity? In: Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Recommender Systems, p 71–74 (2009)

  27. Lesani, M., Montazeri, N.: Fuzzy trust aggregation and personalized trust inference in virtual social networks. Comput. Intell. 25(2), 51–83 (2009)

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  28. Levien, R.: Attack resistant trust metrics, PhD thesis, UC Berkeley, Berkeley (2003)

  29. Lin, C., Varadharajan, V., Wang, Y., Pruthi, V.: Enhancing grid security with trust management. Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Service Computing (2004)

  30. Liu, H., Lim, E. P., Lauw, H. W., Le, M. T., Sun, A., Srivastava, J., Kim, Y. A.: Predicting trusts among users of online communities: an epinions case study. In: proceedings of the 9th ACM conference on electronic commerce (EC), ACM Press, New York, p 310–319 (2008)

  31. Lu, A., Ng, W.: Vague sets or intuitionistic fuzzy sets for handling vague data: Which one is better? In: Delcambre, L.M.L., Kop, C., Mayr, H.C., Mylopoulos, J., Pastor, O., eds.: ER. Volume 3716 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer, 401–416 (2005)

  32. Massa, P.: A survey of trust use and modelling in real online systems. In: Trust in E-services: Technologies, Practices and Challenges, IGI Publishing, p 51–83 (2007)

  33. McPherson, M., Smith-Lovin, L., Cook, J.M.: Birds of a feather: Homophily in social networks. Ann. Rev. Social. 27(1), 415–444 (2001)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  34. Mui, L., Mohtashemi, M., Halberstadt, A.: A computational model of trust and reputation. In; Proceedings of the 35th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Pages 188–196, Big Island (2002)

  35. Nahapiet, J., Ghoshal, S.: Social capital, intellectual capital, and the organizational advantage. Acad. Manag. Rev. 23(2), 242–266 (1998)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  36. O'Donovan, J., Smyth, B.: Trust in recommender systems. In: Proc of 10th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, P 167–174 (2005)

  37. Page, L., Brin, S., Motwani, R., Winograd, T.: The PageRank citation ranking: bringing order to the Web, Technical report, Stanford Digital Library Technologies Project (1998)

  38. Pal, S.K., Mandal, D.P.: Fuzzy logic and approximate reasoning: an overview. J. Inst. Electron. Telecommun. Eng. 37(5&6), 48–560 (1991)

    Google Scholar 

  39. Papagelis, M., Plexousakis, D., Kutsuras, T.: Alleviating the sparsity problem of collaborative filtering using trust inferences, iTrust, P 224–239 (2005)

  40. Pitsilis, G., Marshall, L. F.: A model of trust derivation from evidence for use in recommendation systems, Technical Report. University of Newcastle upon Tyne (2004)

  41. Podobnik, V., Striga, D., Jandras, A., Lovrek, I.: How to calculate trust between social network users? Proc. of the 20th international conference on software, telecommunication and computer networks (2012)

  42. Rainie, L., Anderson, J.: The fate of online trust in the next decade. Pew Research Center, Available at: http://www.pewinternet.org/2017/08/10/the-fate-of-online-trust-in-the-next-decade/ August 2017

  43. Regan, K., Cohen, R., Poupart, P.: The advisor-Pomdp: a principled approach to trust through reputation in electronic markets. In: Proceedings of the Conference on Privacy Security and Trust (2005)

  44. Resnick, P., Iacovou, N., Suchak, M., Bergstrom, P., Riedl, J.: Grouplens: an open architecture for collaborative filtering of net news. In Proceedings of ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, Sharing Information and Creating Meaning, p 175–186 (1994)

  45. Ruan, Y., Durresi, A.: A survey of trust management systems for online social communities–trust modeling, trust inference and attacks. Knowl.-Based Syst. 106, 150–163 (2016)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  46. Scully, M., Preuss, G.: Two faces of trust: the roles of calculative and relational trust in work transformation, Tech. rep. working paper no. 3923–96, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1996)

  47. Selvaraj, C., Anand, S.: Outlier detection in reputation management system for P2P networks using rough set theory. Secur. Commun. Netw. 6(9), 1153–1160 (2013)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  48. Sherchan, W., Nepal, S., Paris, C.: A survey of trust in social networks. ACM Comput. Surv. 45(4), 47 (2013)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  49. Singh, S., Bawa, S.: Privacy, trust and policy based authorization framework for services in distributed environments. Int. J. Comput. Sci. 2(2), 85–92 (2007)

    Google Scholar 

  50. Suryanarayana, G., Taylor, R. N.: A survey of trust management and resource discovery technologies in peer-to-peer applications, Tech. rep. UCI-ISR-04-6, Institute for Software Research, University of California, Irvine (2004)

  51. Tang, J., Gao, H., Liu, H.: mtrust: discerning multi-faceted trust in a connected world. In: Proceedings of the fifth ACM international conference on Web search and data mining, pages 93–102. ACM (2012)

  52. Tavakolifard, M.: On some challenges for online trust and reputation systems, PHD Thesis, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (2012)

  53. Tavakolifard, M., Almeroth, K.C., Gulla, J. A.: Does social contact matter? Modelling the hidden web of trust underlying twitter, international conference on world wide web, May 13–17, p 981–988 (2013)

  54. Xiang, R., Neville, J., Rogati, M.: Modeling relationship strength in online social networks. In: Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on World Wide Web, 981–990, ACM (2010)

  55. Yan, Z., Zhang, P., Vasilakos, A.V.: A survey on trust management for internet of things. J. Netw. Comput. Appl. 42, 120–134 (2014)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  56. Young, A. L., Quan-Haase, A.: Information revelation and internet privacy concerns on social network sites: a case study of facebook, In: Proceedings of the International Conference on Communities and Technologies, p 265–274 (2009)

  57. Yu, B., Singh, M. P.: An evidential model of distributed reputation management, AAMAS 2002, p 294–301 (2002)

  58. Yuan, W., Shu, L., Chao, H.C., Guan, D., Lee, Y.K., Lee, S.: ITARS: trust-aware recommender system using implicit trust networks. IET Commun. 4(14), 1709–1721 (2010)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  59. Zhang, Q., Xie, Q., Wang, G.: A survey on rough set theory and its applications. CAAI Trans. Intell. Technol. 1, 323–333 (2016)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  60. Zhou, W., Duan, W., Piramuthu, S.: A social network matrix for implicit and explicit social network plates. Decis. Support. Syst. 68, 89–97 (2014)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  61. Ziegler, C.N., Golbeck, J.: Investigating interactions of trust and interest similarity. Decis. Support. Syst. 43(2), 460–475 (2007)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  62. Ziegler, C. N., Lausen, G.: Spreading activation models for trust propagation, EEE, 83-97 (2004)

  63. Ziegler, C.N., Lausen, G.: Propagation models for trust and distrust in social networks. Inf. Syst. Front. 7(4–5), 337–358 (2005)

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Netaji Subhas Institute of Technology, New Delhi, India

    Anuradha Yadav, Shampa Chakraverty & Ritu Sibal

Authors
  1. Anuradha Yadav
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Shampa Chakraverty
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Ritu Sibal
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Anuradha Yadav.

Additional information

Publisher’s Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Yadav, A., Chakraverty, S. & Sibal, R. A framework for classifying trust for online systems. World Wide Web 22, 1499–1521 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11280-018-0626-6

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Revised:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11280-018-0626-6

Keywords

Search

Navigation