The relevance of context in trust networks

The increasing use of Internet in real world activities such as e-commerce, blogs, wikies and several others makes the question of trust a critical issue. However, everyone can push information on line, so it is not easy to get knowledge about trust from centralized authorities. Moreover, discovering trusted entities often stricly depends on what context that entity is related to or it is actually exploited for. We address this issue by presenting an approach of searching for a "guru" user (expert in a specific context) using local, context-dependent information within the Epinions.com recommendation network. Results show that context-based search can be used to significantly reduce the number of nodes (users) to query with a limited loss of "guru" nodes