Trustable B2C markets on the semantic web

Semantic Web technologies will deeply influence the further development of the Internet Economy. A major challenge is, however, to find a practical solution for trust problems arising from their deployment in real-world scenarios. In this paper we develop a concrete application scenario based on Semantic Web technologies for the domain of business to consumer electronic commerce to illustrate these problems. A possible underlying technical architecture can well be realized building on todays standards. The resulting scenario is used for a preliminary analysis of the potential impacts of Semantic Web applications on market participants. Specific to the scenario we describe trust requirements and outline a Semantic Web trust architecture which fulfils them. The architecture focuses on the allowing subjective and task-specific trust policies as a combination of reputation-, contextand content-based trust mechanisms.