Towards a Data-Centric Notion of Trust in the Semantic Web

Existing research on trust in the Semantic Web extensively studies trustworthiness and trust in the context of active entities such as persons and agents. However, few work exist that focus on the content in the Semantic Web and that study trustworthiness as an information quality criterion. Hence, computer systems that use the trustworthiness of Semantic Web data for filtering or decision making usually apply a very simple assessment approach: each data object is related to some kind of a source for which a trust score can be determined using one of the methods that exist for active entities; this score is then adopted for the trustworthiness of the data object. In this position paper we argue that such a simple notion of trustworthiness for data is insufficient and we propose to adjust the focus of trust research for the Semantic Web from an actor-centric view to a data-centric perspective.