Credibility of web applications

The popularization of Web has given rise to new services every day, demanding mechanisms to ensure the credibility of these services. Since now, little has been done to measure and understand the credibility of this complex Web environment, which itself is a major research challenge. From the challenges related to the task of assigning a credibility value to an online service in Web 2.0 applications, we propose a framework for the design, implementation and evaluation of credibility models. We call a credibility model a function capable of assigning a credibility value to a transaction of a Web application, considering different criteria of this service and its supplier. To validate this framework and models, we perform experiments using an actual dataset, from which we evaluated different credibility models using distinct types of information sources, and it allows to compare and evaluate these credibility models. The obtained results are very good, showing representative gains, when compared to a baseline and also with a known state-of-the-art approach. The results confirm that the credibility framework can be used to enforce trust to users of services on the Web.