Amateur Fiction Online the Web of Community Trust

Introduction

This paper considers two of three related projects that are currently being undertaken as part of a larger Human-Computer Interaction investigation into whether the seman- tic web can be brought to hobbyist groups on the Internet. The user group chosen as a case study for this project was online amateur fiction community. This community was chosen because it could benefit from Semantic Services in the form of improved searching, improved meta data, automatic recommendation amalgamations, trust-webs and personalisation of such systems. Because this is a Human-Computer Interaction project evaluation will be through usability tests comparing the developed systems to those that are currently available. This paper will first consider the work that has been done in the area of online com- munities and trust which relates to this project. It will then describe the way that user requirements were gathered from the user community through an online questionnaire as well as through direct interaction with volunteers from the community. Having de- fined the requirements of the community this paper will go on to describe two of the projects that are trying those needs. The first defines a foaf extension tailored to the needs of amateur writers and readers. This paves the way for the second project, adding a web of trust to the community and investigating whether this is a possible way of deal- ing with some of the community’s access control needs. Finally I will consider what the next steps in this research are.

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