Architecture for Decision-Making and Task-Oriented Reasoning for the Web of Trust

Abstract

This paper presents an architecture for a system that allows Semantic Web agents to reason within what has come to be known as the Web of Trust. We integrated reasoning about belief and trust, so agents can reason about information from different sources and deal with contradictions. Software agents interact to support users who publish, share and search for documents in a distributed repository. Each agent maintains an individualized topic taxonomy for the user it represents, updating it with information obtained from other agents. When new information leads to a contradiction, the agent performs a belief revision process informed by a degree of belief in a statement and a degree of trust an agent has for the information source.