Communication Technology and New Media Commons^™

A Heuristic Algorithm For Trust-Oriented Service Provider Selection In Complex Social Networks, Guanfeng Liu, Yan Wang, Mehmet A. Orgun, Ee Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In a service-oriented online social network consisting of service providers and consumers, a service consumer can search trustworthy service providers via the social network. This requires the evaluation of the trustworthiness of a service provider along a certain social trust path from the service consumer to the service provider. However, there are usually many social trust paths between participants in social networks. Thus, a challenging problem is which social trust path is the optimal one that can yield the most trustworthy evaluation result. In this paper, we first present a novel complex social network structure and a new concept, Quality …