TREPPS: A Trust-based Recommender System for Peer Production Services

Peer production, a new mode of production, is gradually shifting the traditional, capital-intensive wealth production to a model which heavily depends on information creating and sharing. More and more online users are relying on this type of services such as news, articles, bookmarks, and various user-generated contents around World Wide Web. However, the quality and the veracity of peers’ contributions are not well managed. Without a practical means to assess the quality of peer production services, the consequence is information-overloading. In this study, we present a recommender system based on the trust of social networks. Through the trust computing, the quality and the veracity of peer production services can be appropriately assessed. Two prominent fuzzy logic applications – fuzzy inference system and fuzzy MCDM method are utilized to support the decision of service choice. The experimental results showed that the proposed recommender system can significantly enhance the quality of peer production services and furthermore overcome the information overload problems. In addition, a trust-based social news system is built to demonstrate the application of the proposed system. 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.