UTPO: User's Trust Profile Ontology - Modeling trust towards Online Health Information Sources

Abstract

Despite the overwhelming quantity of health information that is available online today, finding reliable and trustworthy information is still challenging, even when advanced recommender systems are used. To tackle this challenge and improve our recommended sources, we need to first understand and capture the user behavior of what is considered to be trustworthy. This paper presents a taxonomy of relevant factors that influence user' trust towards online health information sources. We design a survey experiment to validate the taxonomical factors, and propose an ontology using the taxonomy of factors, such that each user's trust could be modeled as an instance of our ontology and this could later be used programmatically to recommend trustworthy information sources. Our work will inform the design of personalized recommendation systems and websites to improve online delivery of health information.