On Modeling Political Systems to Support the Trust Process

Modern political life is heavily dependent and influenced by claims about facts made about participants in a Political System (seen here as sets of agents and organizations that govern a society). Such claims are commonly found in news stories, tweets, and social media postings, and, depending on each user, they may be considered “true” or “false”. The decision to act based on a fact contained in a claim is dependent on the agent’s trust on the claim, i.e., that the fact being stated is indeed “true”. In this paper, we propose a framework to describe the trust process, which can serve as a a support for various possible models of content trust. Within this framework, we present POLARE, an ontology to describe a Political System, which includes provenance information, and illustrate how it may provide information to feed the trust process in online news stories. As a case study, we illustrate the approach using a Knowledge Graph created with such claims, which can be queried in order to better understand the existing relations between agents in the Political System in Brazil. In order to use claims in this Knowledge Graph, users will typically require provenance information to make trust judgements about them.