In April 2016 Manchester eScholar was replaced by the University of Manchester’s new Research Information Management System, Pure. In the autumn the University’s research outputs will be available to search and browse via a new Research Portal. Until then the University’s full publication record can be accessed via a temporary portal and the old eScholar content is available to search and browse via this archive.

Related resources

Search for item elsewhere

University researcher(s)

Academic department(s)

TRUST-AWARE INFORMATION RETRIEVAL IN PEER-TO-PEER ENVIRONMENTS

Zhang, Ye

[Thesis]. Manchester, UK: The University of Manchester; 2011.

Access to files

FULL-TEXT.PDF (pdf)

Abstract

Information Retrieval in P2P environments (P2PIR) has become an active ﬁeld of research due to the observation that P2P architectures have the potential to become as appealing as traditional centralised architectures. P2P networks are formed with voluntary peers that exchange information and accomplish various tasks. Some of them may be malicious peers spreading untrustworthy resources. However, existing P2PIR systems only focus on ﬁnding relevant documents, while trustworthiness of documents and document providers has been ignored. Without prior experience and knowledge about the network, users run the risk to review,download and use untrustworthy documents, even if these documents are relevant. The work presented in this dissertation provide the ﬁrst integrated framework for trust-aware Information Retrieval in P2P environments, which can retrieve not only relevant but also trustworthy documents. The proposed content trust models extend an existing P2P trust management system, PeerTrust, in the context of P2PIR to compute the trust values of documents and document providers for given queries. A method is proposed to estimate global term statistics which are integrated with existing relevance-based approaches for document ranking and peer selection. Diﬀerent approaches are explored to ﬁnd optimal parametersettings in the proposed trust-aware P2PIR systems. Moreover, system architectures and data management protocols are designed to implement the proposed trust-aware P2PIR systems in structured P2P networks. The experimental evaluation demonstrates that P2PIR can beneﬁt from trust-aware P2PIR systems signiﬁcantly. It can importantly reduce the possibility of untrustworthy documents in the top-ranked result list. The proposed estimated global term statistics can provide acceptable and competitive retrieval accuracy within diﬀerent P2PIR scenarios.