Integrating trust with public reputation in location-based social networks for recommendation making

The recent emergence of location-based social networking services is revolutionizing web-based social networking allowing users to share real-life experiences via geo-tagged user-generated multimedia content. One of the key challenges of the web-based social networks as an information sharing and exchanging channel is how to manage healthy relationships among community users and ensure the quality of the information shared and exchanged within the community, which holds a very significant importance to user satisfaction. Deciding whom and what information to trust is very difficult in environment where the users are unknown to each other. This paper investigates the possibilities of managing trust between the users of a web-based social network while recommending items to the members of the network. A novel framework is proposed to integrate trust among community members and public reputation of items to recommend the most appropriate items to a user of the network.