Standing on the shoulders of the trusted web: Trust, Scholarship and Linked Data.

Abstract

The web of linked data is incompatible with the modern "selfish scientist". What is missing is a mechanism that supports both what scientists share, and how they share. Solutions must be informed by social, technical and cultural issues surrounding the sharing of scientific data in the web of linked data. We propose the adoption of social trust techniques to share a new emerging class of scientific digital object - Research Objects. We suggest a mechanism for introducing social trust metrics into the distributed social web to facilitate access control to aggregations of linked data resources. Through the application and analysis of two established trust metrics, we then present the grounding of the Colleague of a Colleague (Cocoa) trust metric suited to the sharing of scientific knowledge delivered as Research Objects.