Masterarbeit
Migrating TRAVOS to the Redecentralized Web
Completion
2023/08
Research Area
Students
Amimul Ihsan Rumi
Advisers
Description
The web as we know it has grown significantly over the years and nowadays it plays an important role in our day to day lives. In the current centralized web structure, users have limited control on their own data. As data is stored central per application or ecosystem, users find themselves in a walled garden. This motivates the web to decentralize data storage with increased data control and privacy for users by eliminating the reliance on centralized authorities. Current initiatives such as EU’s Next Generation Internet and Tim Berners-Lee Social Linked Data (SoLiD) introduced the idea of re- decentralization of the web. One of the imminent challenges in redecentralization of the web is to make decentralized web application aware of trust to be trustworthy for their users. A common solution to this challenge is trust management. In the current centralized web, consumer and provider rely on centralized authorities to establish trust relationships and make trust aware decisions on their behalf. The centralized authority classifies third party applications as trustworthy if some predefined conditions are fulfilled or validated.
The re-decentralized web can be modelled as a Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) on a conceptual level due to its open and dynamic structure. A MAS is a group of intelligent agents that interact with each other and the environment to get the desired output. Agents could be any software entities or human beings. The dynamic structure of the re-decentralized web such as SoLiD questions for web applications the trustworthiness of data from third parties. Especially, where the sources of data may be unknown or even hidden. To overcome this challenge most suitable trust model needs to be identified in the context of the redecentralized web. For the purpose of this thesis, a reputed trust model named TRAVOS is being chosen to evaluate trust between the agents. By migrating TRAVOS to re-decentralized web it can help web applications to produce trust aware decisions autonomously. TRAVOS is a common trust model in the trustworthiness research in the MAS domain and could does be a candidate to evaluate trust autonomously for redecentralized web applications. It stays open to this end how to adapt TRAVOS to a given use case of dynamic linked data acquisition of one web application.
The objective of this master thesis is to find an approach or a combination of approaches to solve the mentioned problem for the migration of TRAVOS to the redecentralized web. This particularly includes the state of the art regarding trust models and their migration to new use cases. The demonstration of feasibility with an implementation prototype of the concept is part of this thesis as well as a suitable evaluation with exemplary and empirical use cases.
