XDI Trust Information: Trustability protocol for validating distributed personal information

Trust of information has always been a critical issue in large distributed environments. With the rapid and recent development of online communities and social networks, it has been evident that the Web will rely more and more on user-edited information. As a consequence trust in the correctness of data is falling dramatically and no general solution has been proposed in order to consider that specific but fundamental problem. Trustworthiness on the Internet is usually addressed as a problem of privacy and security(1). So, until now, the solutions to the trust issues are focused on privacy and security. For instance, certificates and the TLS protocol address authentication and data transfer security. The OASIS Consortium addresses information control through the XDI contract links, which are part of the Dataweb architecture (2). This paper is introducing a method for endorsing content correctness based on social participation and the Dataweb paradigm. The general idea is that by creating special XDI contract links supporting trusty-trustee relationships (XDI Trust Information(XTI) contract links), people will be able to estimate the correctness of information using collective intelligence or give their trust to any data for improving the social perception of its correctness. In the future, a new generation of web browser would be able to use the power of XTI and the Dataweb architecture in order to give people a critical view of information. For spreading the technology it should be necessary to fully specify XTI and integrate it in XDI and make it an Internet standard. However, this cannot be done at the moment since the first official release of the XDI specifications is expected before April 2009.