I was just looking at the Workshop on Models of Trust for the Web (which I was hipped to through Dragomir Radev‘s ilist) and was delighted to read an articulation of something I was just talking to a West Pole colleague about, namely abusing inference engines used within the Semantic Web framework to mislead people. The description of this workshop names this Semantic Web Spam (SWAM)…
“As it gets easier to add information to the web via html
pages, wikis, blogs, and other documents, it gets tougher
to distinguish accurate information from inaccurate or
untrustworthy information. A search engine query usually
results in several hits that are outdated and/or from
unreliable sources and the user is forced to go through
the results and pick what she/he considers the most
reliable information based on her/his trust
requirements. With the introduction of web services, the
problem is further exacerbated as users have to come up
with a new set of requirements for trusting web services
and web services themselves require a more automated way
of trusting each other. Apart from inaccurate or outdated
information, we also need to anticipate Semantic Web Spam
(SWAM) where spammers publish false facts and scams to
deliberately mislead users. This workshop is interested in
all aspects of enabling trust on the web.”
