Forging Trust and Privacy with User Modeling Frameworks: An Ontological Analysis

With the ever increasing importance of social networking sites and services, socially intelligent agents who are responsible for gathering, managing and maintaining knowledge surrounding individual users are of increasing interest to both computing research communities as well as industries. For these agents to be able to fully capture and manage the knowledge about a user’s interaction with these social sites and services, a social user model needs to be introduced. A social user model is defined as a generic user model (model capable of capturing generic information related to a user), plus social dimensions of users (models capturing social aspects of user such as activities and social contexts). While existing models capture a proportion of such information, they fail to model and present ones of the most important dimensions of social connectivity: trust and privacy. To this end, in this paper, we introduce an ontological model of social user, composed by a generic user model component, which imports existing well-known user model structures, a social model, which contains social dimensions, and trust, reputation and privacy become the pivotal concepts gluing the whole ontological knowledge models together. Keywords-trust and reputation; privacy; user modeling; ontologies; semantic adaptive social web