TrustVis: A trust visualisation service for online communities

Abstract

Visualisation of social behaviour of members in online communities is a challenging issue. It provides holistic information on the behaviour of the community to the administrators/moderators and helps individual members in the community to monitor and analyse their own behaviour. This paper presents the design and implementation of a social trust visualisation service, called TrustVis, where the social trust is derived from the social behaviour of members in the community. One of the unique features of TrustVis is that it supports the faceted browsing and monitoring of members' social behaviour based on activities, contexts, time and roles. TrustVis is implemented and deployed in an online community we are currently trialling in collaboration with a government department to deliver support services to welfare recipients during their transition back to work. We describe the look and feel and the working of TrustVis in our production environment. © Springer-Verlag 2013.