Data Management in the Social Web

Abstract

An interesting observation relates to the fact that the most successful applications on the Web incorporate some sort of social mechanism. This is true for commercial success stories, such as Ebay with its reputation mechanism, Amazon with its recommendation tool and Google with PageRank, a recommendation-based ranking algorithm. Peer-to-peer file sharing and photo sharing are other recent examples were the essence of the application consists of social interactions. In these applications large numbers of anonymous participants interact, such that mechanisms for social control become increasingly important. This explains the recent interest in reputation-based trust management. The same issues will emerge when large numbers of services will be deployed over the Web through Web services and Grid computing technology.