Developing a "Web of Trust" Rating to Support Tsunami Rehabilitation Coordination

Proposal for an MSc project to be carried out at http://www.servelots.com.

Servelots

Servelots is a company based in the wider Bangelore area in India developing Pantoto, a toolset for small organizations, particularly those in the social development sector, Non-Profit (NPOs) and Non-Government Organizations (NGO's), that enables them to manage their information and communication without software development dependency. Servelots has an MSC project on rating the level of trust of different pieces of information occurring in the http://www.Ground1.org web site used to coordinate the various tsunami rehabilitation efforts.

The Ground1.org Organization

http://Ground1.org is a website to provide support to the people and organizations working on the field (ground0) of tsunami-affected areas. Project Ground1 consists of two coordinating units of activities.

• Ground1 website development: includes both the technical development work on the website and the volunteer-based projects that lead to the content coordination of the website.

• Ground1 knowledge center: physical location in the affected areas, currentky in four different locations in India. Ground1 knowledge centers are run by volunteers with the primary goal of helping the NGOs and other organizations develop capacity to report and request information and needs on the ground.

Problem

There are a large number of organizations working directly on the problems at ground0 and some that help towards working on the Ground1 project. The project is mostly volunteer-driven and invites people to participate in the effective development of the Ground1 website. Over time a large number of people are expected to participate in this activity, who will rely on their own information as well as information obtained from other sources.

A key question then becomes how reliable and trustworthy the contents of the various pages in the Ground1 web site can be. This project aims at developing techniques to assess the trustworthyness of the various Ground1 web pages.

In particular the project proposes to adopt the Friend-of-a-Friend approach to create a web-of-trust that is part of the Semantic Web technology provided by the World Wide Web Consortium W3C.

This should result in a Support-of-Trust component that shall help humans identify the significance of a posting or a report based on a trust-level indicated by the network of trusted bodies and a rating scheme based on time and value of the information.

MSc Project

The MSc project consists of:

• Literature study on semantic web and web-of-trust technologies, as well as an analysis of the role such technologies can play in the creation and evolution of web applications.
• Development of the Support-of-Trust component for Ground1
• Analysis of the stability of the Support-of-Trust assessments in an evolving web application.

The project will be conducted under the supervision of dr. T. B. Dinesh from the Servelots company based in the Bangelore area of India.