Exploring trust to rank reputation in microblogging

Abstract

The Web 2.0 is the top manifestation of User-Generated Content systems, such as reviews, tags, comments, tweets etc. Due to their free nature such systems contain information of different quality levels. Consequently, it is difficult for users to determine the quality of the information and the reputation of its providers. The quality evaluation is a matter of great concern, especially in medical and healthcare domain. To help the posts quality assessment this paper presents an alternative to measuring reputation based on social interactions. As a test case, we explore the data structure of the Twitter micro blogging service. Our main contribution is to provide a new methodology to Rank Reputation in a network structure based on weighted social interaction. This approach can guide Internet users to encounter authority and trustworthy sources of online health and medical information in Twittershpere. The results show that the rank methodology and the network structure have succeeded in inferring user reputation.