Grouptrust: Finding trust-based group structures in social communities

Observing the features of the information actually stored in the Web, we can recognize that an important issue to be investigated is that of discovering relationships between groups of objects. In particular, a great interest is emerging on finding groups of objects mutually linked by reciprocal relationships of trustworthiness. In this paper, we propose a model to represent the case of trust-based groups of objects, and we present an algorithm for detecting trust associations in virtual communities in presence of these groups. Such an algorithm consists in determining particular sub-structures of the community, called trust groups, representing objects mutually connected by strong trust relationships. We technically formalize our idea and algorithm, and we present a complete example of how our approach works.