The small-world trust network

The topology of the trust network is important to optimize its usage in the trust-aware applications. However, since the users can join trust network ubiquitously, the structure of the highly dynamic trust network is still unknown. This paper contributes to verify that the trust network is the small-world network, and its small-world topology is independent of its dynamics. This is achieved by verifying the scale-freeness of five trust networks extracted from real online sites. Using the small-world nature of the trust network, we optimize the rating prediction mechanism of the conventional trust-aware recommender system. Experimental results clearly show that our proposed mechanism can achieve the maximum accuracy and coverage with the minimum computation complexity for the rating predictions.