Trustshop: Building a social trust network

Undergraduate thesis submitted to the Department of Computer Science and Information Systems, Ashesi University, in partial fulfillment of Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science, May 2022Online social networks have increased in recent years. In many areas, such as businesses and governmental organizations, organizations of all sizes have been using social networks to thrive. As a result of this, the concept of trust comes into the picture, as individuals divulge a large amount of personal information on social networks. It is more important than ever to create and measure trust in a social network for people's privacy, safety, and livelihood. This paper aims to identify ways to use the social network structure and the trust links between them to predict how much two people who are not directly connected could trust one another. Inferring such trust values is hard to compute when person A and person B are unconnected in the social network. This paper presents a graph-based model to evaluate trust in an online social network. It focused on computing the quality assessment of person A for person B, considering that person A and B are unconnected in a given graph of quality assessment of people. The proposed model's accuracy in predicting a trust value is calculated and compared to the multiplicative strategies for trust propagation [11]. This paper also proves how this model can be used in real scenarios to answer how trustworthy someone is innate.Ashesi Universit