Trust Management in Online Communities

Our perception of trust works as a compass for safe navigation through a world of uncertainty. On the one hand it helps us find peers with whom interaction and collaboration is most likely to be fruitful. On the other hand it helps us steer away from unacceptable risks and potential deceptions. While human intuition about trust often fails, it seems to provide us with guidance very quickly in most situations, which has the effect of significantly saving cognitive effort. Online communities represent a new environment for human interaction, and we often find that our capability to reason about trust is not well adapted to online environments. The reason for this can be the limitation of current digital interfaces which thereby reduces the richness of information we receive about others, and also the fact that people actually encounter misrepresentation or deceptive online services and behaviour relatively often. Trust management in online communities aims at making trust reasoning more powerful and reliable by collecting, analysing and disseminating information that is relevant for trust and trust based decision making. This article describes semantic aspects of trust as well as principles and methods for building online trust and reputation systems. The problems and challenges for designing and implementing reliable trust and reputation systems are invoked and some potential solutions are mentioned. Finally, the article articulates our vision for trust management in online communities.