Trusting information sources one citizen at a time

Abstract

This paper describes an approach to derive assessments about information sources based on individual feedback about the sources. We describe TRELLIS, a system that helps users annotate their analysis of alternative information sources that can be contradictory and incomplete. As the user makes a decision on which sources to dismiss and which to believe in making a final decision, TRELLIS captures the derivation of the decision in a semantic markup. TRELLIS then uses these annotations to derive an assessment of the source based on the annotations of many individuals. Our work builds on the Semantic Web and presents a tool that helps users create annotations that are in a mix of formal and human language, and exploits the formal representations to derive measures of trust in the content of Web resources and their original source. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2002.