A Multiple Trust Paths Selection Tool in Contextual Online Social Networks

Abstract

Online Social Network (OSN) is becoming popular, where trust is one of the most important factors for participants’ decision making. This requires to efficiently and effectively select those social trust paths that can yield the most trustworthy trust evaluation results between two unknown participants to establish reasonable trust relationships between them. Thus, we develop a Multiple Trust Paths (MTP) selection tool based on the state-of-the-art trust paths selection method proposed by us, which considers the social contexts, like the social trust and social intimacy degree between participants, and the role impact factor of participants in trust paths selection. Our tool could help users evaluate the trustworthiness of unknown participants in a variety of OSN based applications, for instance, to help a retailer identify new trustworthy customers and introduce products to them, or help users select the trustworthy workers in OSN based crowdsourcing platforms.