Scientific Mashups: The Issue of Trust in the Aggregation of Web 2.0 Content

The concept of scientic mashups is gaining popularity as the sheer amount of scientic content is scattered over different sources, such as databases or public websites. A variety of mashup development frameworks exist, but none fully address the needs of the scientic community. One limitation of scientic mashups is the issue of trust and attribute; especially when the content comes from collaborative information repositories where the quality of such content is unknown. In this paper, for our case study we focus on CalSWIM whose content is taken from both highly reliable sources and Wikipedia which may be less so. We will show how integrating CalSWIM with a reputation management system can help us assess the reputation of users and the trustworthiness of the content. Using user reputations, the system selects the most recent and trustworthy revision of the wiki article rather than merely the most recent revision, which might be vandalistic or of poor quality.