An Approach to Trust Based on Social Networks

In the era of Internet-based communities, trusting has become a crucial matter in communities creation and evolution. In this paper we introduce an approach to the question of trusting inspired by social, real world networks. We aim at reproducing the behaviour individuals adopt in their life when they establish and maintain trust relationships, gathering information and opinions from their friends to assign trust to a new acquaintance they need to contact. We show that preliminary results are promising for building an effective and efficient trusting management in Internet communities.