Proposal: Creating a Scalable Web of Trust

*Problem: *To date, there has yet to be developed highly scalable, open
solution, on the web, such that users can grow their own reputation, and
grow trust with other people, groups, and societies.

Often your reputation is locked in silos and walled gardens.  If we were
able to create an open web of trust, that brings your online reputation
footprint together, it would be possible for people to interact, trade and
communicate with each other with much less uncertainty.

Using Linked Data it is now possible to start stitching the various of
pockets of trust together so that they can be both machine and human
readable, so that we can have have distributed trust and reputation claims
across the web, under our own control.

It would be good to start to incrementally stitch these trust zones
together using a common vocabulary and language.  We should begin by
bootstrapping existing systems that can be modelled and will accept patches.

Two effective places to start are 1) bitcoin otc and 2) the GPG web of
trust.  The aim would be to have a common extensible trust vocabulary by
year end that can subsume both these systems, and be extended to many
others.

*About bitcoin otc.*  ( http://bitcoin-otc.com/ ) This is a sophisticated
system where buyers and sellers come together and if they transact
successfully they can leave each other a message and improve their rating.
I've selected this one because A) it's a common use case B) having spoken
to the maintainer, he is willing to let us supply patches to add terms to
the vocabulary

*About GPG.  *Most here will be familiar with the GPG web of trust, it is a
PKI system that enables users to trust each other, encrypt and sign
messages, log in to servers, sign code and a number of other security based
functions.  I've selected GPG because there's already an existing schema (
http://xmlns.com/wot/0.1/ )

*What needs to be done?*
- Bring Bitcoin OTC onto the web of trust
  - An ontology should be incrementally developed to model each page of
bitcoin OTC
  - The ontology should be published in a long lasting place (e.g. w3org.id)
  - Patches should be submitted to the open source to create RDFa markup

- Bring GPG onto the web of trust
  - Go over the GPG ontology to see if anything needs to be changed
  - Update the wot/foaf vocabs with findings above
  - Liaise with GPG mailing list to see that we have the right terms
  - Create a web based proof of concept that can show GPG trust lines

*Summary.  *By combining multiple trust sources across the web, we can
start to create a scalable reputation footprint for users online, that
allows them to break out of any one silo.  By starting off with two target
environments, we can extend this to many more over time, allowing users to
become fully in control of their online reputation.

We just need some people to help create and maintain the dictionary of
terms (schema) and to start putting rel and property tags into the relevant
web pages.  If anyone is interested in helping to flesh this out idea, feel
free to join the conversation!