Trust Management System for Semantic Web
Raman Pal
M.Sc. Web Technology
School of Electronics & Computer Science
University of Southampton
rp5g09@ecs.soton.ac.uk
Abstract
The Web 2.0 is in the process of
revolutionizing from the web of data to the
web of semantics. Trust is the necessary
factor for determining the truth behind
anything that is claimed on the semantic
web. Trust management is broadly defined
into two different categories, Policy Based
& Reputation Based. This report will talk
about almost all the aspects related to
trust management system for semantic
web.
Keywords
Trust, Security, Semantic Web, Reputation,
Policy, Trust Management System
1. Introduction
The World Wide Web is evolving from the
web of unorganised information to the web
of meaning i.e. Semantics. Whenever we
talk about information, trust becomes very
important factor, as the source of
information and services is a highly
anonymous system and distributed system
like web. Since the very inception of the
web, trust has been a concern [1].
Semantic web has defined trust on the top
most layer of the Semantic web stack.
Trust management for the semantic web is
refers to the source of information who
actually claims to be the source of
information. Semantic web will make the
web a unique system of information where
trust will determine the truth related to
claims of information made on the web.
The trust management system can be
broadly classified into two types [2] they
are: Reputation Based Trust Management
System and Policy Based Trust
Management System. This report will
study and present the aspects related to
trust management system for the Semantic
web.
2. Semantic Web
The WWW is presently considered as a
system for exchange of information and
documents between users sitting in
different networks. “The Semantic Web is
an evolving development of the World
Wide Web in which the semantics of
information and services on the web is
defined, making it possible for the web to
understand and satisfy the requests of
people and machines to use the web
content.”[3] The semantic web will be a
step towards a new era where information
will be in a standard machine-readable
format. “In semantic web each object or
resource will be given a unique identifier
in the form of URI (Uniform Resource
Identifier)” [1]. Essentially the semantic
web consists of layer and each layer takes
advantage from the previous layer. The
basis of semantic web is the stack made by
Sir Tim Berners Lee where he has kept
trust as a very important factor in the
semantic web stack and kept it on top of
every other stack as shown in figure:-1.

All these layers shown above are very
finely explained by [1][3]. [3] Clearly
states the issues related to accessibility,
trust and credibility.
3. Trust Management and Semantic
Web
Trust, in simple words is the degree of
faith you can put in an assertion to
consider it true or false. Let us divert
ourselves to very basic human nature,
today when we go online on WWW to buy
something on E-bay or Amazon, how and
from where do we assess the genuineness
of the product we are likely to buy?
Usually we check the ratings or reputation
of the seller, and if it seems good enough
and trustworthy, we a go step further in
making the payment and buying it.
Similarly when we receive a bank
statement online or we make a web
payment, we try to look for a padlock sign
on our browser which helps us trust the
Secure Socket layer (SSL). In both the
cases stated above we took some decision
on the basis of trust that we were able to
place in them. The former approach was
the Reputation based trust management
and the latter case we talked about was the
Policy based trust management.
These are the two broad ways which will
be implemented to manage the trust factor
associated with semantic web [2][4].
3.1.Policy based Trust Management
Policy based trust management system are
usually placed at the point of critical
information interchange, where every bit
of precision is necessary. A set of
credentials and policies are specified to
determine whether an individual should be
trusted or not. This system has been very
finely explained in [5-7]. “Policy-based
trust is used in access control decisions.
We use Declarative policies for the
environments where specifying access
control conditions are eventually meant to
yield a Boolean decision i.e. the requested
resource is either granted or denied” [2].
Digital signature and security token are
one of the many ways to trust the source of
information and to trust that the
information has not been modified in the
transit. Web services on the Semantic Web
are completely automated processes where
the services interact to the other services.
To determine the trust factor associated
with the web services is really tough task
and thus Policy based trust management
system are preferred.
3.2. Reputation based Trust
Management
Reputation based trust management
system relies on the very human nature of
getting convinced with the number of odds
in favour of the entity. “Reputation-based
trust uses personal experience and the
experiences of others, possibly combined,
to make a trust decision about an entity, on
the basis of experiences an entity decides
trustworthiness of another entity” [2]. It is
the same case as described earlier for
shopping on E-bay or Amazon. The buyer
considers the user ratings as the reputation
of the seller. If the seller has 4/5 stars or
5/5 stars than the buyer considers the seller
to be very reliable one and if it is less than
3/5 than the consideration for the product
and the seller diminishes accordingly.
Many other reputation based system are
presented in [8, 9].
4. Trust management the other way
round
Many researches in this particular area of
semantic web have revealed many other
approaches to manage the trust associated
with semantic web.
a) Friend of a friend (FOAF) [10].
b) Trust Data Model [4]
c) SPORAS is a centralized trust
model that provides a reputation
mechanism for loosely connected
online communities [11][12].
d) EigenTrust[13] algorithm
computes a global trust value
similar to PageRank in a peer-to-
peer network. EigenTrust
emphasizes on security problems
such as betrayal. It lies between
peers, but it does not support
personalized trust calculation
either.
e) Integrated approach for Trust
Management based on integrating
Policy based and Reputation based
trust systems. [2]
Figure: - 3 Integrated Approach for trust
management [2]
5. Conclusion and Future Works
In this report we identified the research
work done so far in the field of trust
associated with semantic web. All the
models for trust management were
presented and discussed in brief. The
integrated approach suggested by [2] is
one of the benchmarks for the future work.
Future enhancement in this field demands
development of a trust model, which
should include the best of all the models,
to achieve the purpose of trust in the
Semantic web.
6. References
[1] Mojtaba Katebi and S.D. Katebi:
“Trust Models Analysis for the
Semantic Web”, 2009 2nd International
Conference on Developments in eSystems
Engineering.
[2] Shahzad Ali: “An Integrated
approach for Trust Management in
Semantic Web”.
[3] Maryam Tahajod, Azadeh Iranmehr,
Nasim khozooyi “Trust Management for
Semantic Web”, 2009 2nd International
Conference on Computer and Electrical
Engineering.
[4] WANG Xue, ZHANG Fan “A New
Trust Model based on Social
Characteristic and Reputation
Mechanism for the Semantic Web”,
2008 Workshop on Knowledge Discovery
and Data Mining.
[5] P. Bonatti and P. Samarati,
“Regulating service access and
information release on the web”, In
Proceedings of the 7th ACM conference
on computer and communications security,
2000.
[6] P. A. Bonatti and D. Olmedilla,
“Driving and monitoring provisional
trust negotiation with metapolicies”, In
IEEE 6th International Workshop on
Policies for Distributed Systems and
Networks (POLICY), Sweden, jun 2005.
IEEE Computer Society.
[7] R. Gavriloaie,W. Nejdl, D. Olmedilla,
K. E. Seamons, and M.Winslett, “No
registration needed: How to use
declarative policies and negotiation to
access sensitive resources on the
semantic web”, in 1st European Semantic
Web Symposium (ESWS 2004).
[8] S. D. Kamvar, M. T. Schlosser, and H.
Garcia-Molina, “Eigenrep: Reputation
management in p2p networks”, In
Proceedings of 12th International WWW
Conference, 2003.
[9] C. Duma, N. Shahmehri, and G.
Caronni, “Dynamic trust metrics for
peer-to-peer systems”, In Proc. of 2nd
IEEE Workshop on P2P Data
Management, Security and Trust, August
2005.
[10] Jennifer Golbeck, Bijan Parsia, James
Hendler “Trust Networks on the
Semantic Web”.
[11] Yu Zhang, Huajun Chen, Zhaohui
Wu, Xiaoqing Zheng, “A Reputation-
Chain Trust Model for the Semantic
Web”.
[12] G. Zacharia and P. Maes, “Trust
management through reputation
mechanisms”, Applied Artificial
Intelligence, 2000.
[13] S.D. Kamvar, M.T. Schlosser, and H.
Garcia-Molina, “The EigenTrust
algorithm for reputation management
in P2P networks”, In Proceedings of the
Twelfth International World Wide Web
Conference, Budapest, Hungary, 2003.