Trust-oriented service provider selection in complex online social networks

Abstract

In recent years, Online Social Networks (OSNs) with numerous participants have been used as the means for rich activities. For example, employers could use OSNs to investigate potential employees, and participants could use OSNs to look for movie recommendations. In these activities, trust is one of the most important indication of participants decision making, greatly demanding the evaluation of the trustworthiness of a service provider along certain social trust paths from a service consumer. In this chapter, we first analyze the characteristics of the current generation of functional websites and the current generation of online social networks based on their functionality and sociality, and present the properties of the new generation of social network based web applications. Then we present a new selection model considering both adjacent and end-to-end constraints, based on a novel concept Quality of Trust and a novel complex social network structure. Moreover, in order to select the optimal one from a lot of social trust paths yielding the most trustworthy trust evaluation result, this chapter presents an effective and efficient heuristic algorithm for optimal social trust path selection with constraints, which is actually an NP-Complete problem. Experimental results illustrate that our proposed method outperforms existing models in both efficiency and the quality of delivered solutions. This work provides key techniques to potentially lots of service-oriented applications with social networks as the backbone.