
title: | WebTrust: Agent platform for identifying trustworthy commercial websites |
author: | Wouter F. Stoutjesdijk |
published in: | August 2001 |
appeared as: |
Master of Science thesis Delft University of Technology |
pages: | 97 |
Postscript (1.565 KB) |

Abstract
The vast amount of information on the Internet drives the Information Age: we want to know
more about more. Unfortunately, the Internet does not guarantee the quality of this information.
It is posted by newspapers, scientific institutes, salesmen and individuals. All of these people
have their own interests, their own cultural and political background and their own objective for
posting this information. Therefore, when gathering information from the Internet we have to
be careful about which of these sources to use: we only want the trusted ones. And because we
want to gather as much information as possible, an automated way of 'harvesting' it was called
for. This application should be able to gather trusted information from all over the Web and
label its quality in the sense of trustworthiness.
This thesis presents the blueprint for such an application including a prototype the can indicate
trust levels for commercial websites. The prototype is based on the way people assess trust on
websites. This was investigated and formalised into a model. Every user of this prototype has
his own agent that has learned what its user finds important in trust. The agent examines the
site and returns the trust value the user would have given. When this user wants to have the
trust opinion of a friend or an expert he can use his agent too. All the agents will negotiate with
each other on the outcomes and supply the user with one uniform result. In this thesis tests have
been performed on the quality of these agents and the way in which they should be trained.