‘Trust’ is used in a variety of ways in computing literature, and social trust is emerging as an important computational problem. In open, distributed systems, like the web, people and organizations can be anonymous and trust and reputation become important.

Computing with Social Trust brings together a collection of important work in computing social trust from computer science and related disciplines. It is divided into three major sections. The first addresses theory, behaviour, and trust management, covering social analyses of how people develop trust, the dynamics of trust relationships, and systems for trust management. The second section describes algorithms and methods for computing trust in social contexts. Social networks, profile similarity, and participation in online communities are all potential sources from which trust can be computed. The final section contains applications that use trust, such as recommender systems, website access control, and email filtering.