Semantic representation of user's mental trust model

Abstract

It is believed that trust will be the primary mental force in the electronic environment as it is in the current physical environment. At the core trust is impacted by users' propensity to trust (internal mental state), reliance on the trustee and external direct and indirect factors. Decentralization of publication is one of the great advantages of the internet infrastructure. Web 2.0 applications aim to promote and assist online users to publish and contribute freely for Collective Intelligence. They resolve around the notion that people can add contents for Collective Intelligence and enterprises can also use the contents to reduce costs and increase profits through Social Network Analysis. This paper proposes a conceptual mental trust recognition and evaluation model and meta-document structure to represent, distribute and store users trust evaluations. The proposed document design is based on decentralized information structure that semantically represents contributed contents and the contributor. The contents are represented and distributed by using Atom, Resource Description Framework (RDF) and RDF Schema. The proposed metadocument structure uses RDF Schema to semantically represent users' internal (inner) online trust evaluation model within Web 2.0 environment. It can be used as a blueprint to develop new vocabularies for any e-domain. However, trust recognition model is selected due to its importance in electronic environment. © 2007 Springer.