Toward Trust-Based Recommender Systems for Open Data: A Literature Review

In recent years, the concept of "open data" has received increasing attention among data providers and publishers. For some data portals in public sectors, such as data.gov, the openness enables public oversight of governmental proceedings. For many other data portals, especially those in academia, open data has shown its potential for driving new scientific discoveries and creating opportunities for multidisciplinary collaboration. While the number of open data portals and the volume of shared data have increased significantly, most open data portals still use keywords and faceted models as their primary methods for data search and discovery. There should be opportunities to incorporate more intelligent functions to facilitate the data flow between data portals and end-users. To find more theoretical and empirical evidence for that proposition, in this paper, we conduct a systematic literature review of open data, social trust, and recommender systems to explain the fundamental concepts and illustrate the potential of using trust-based recommender systems for open data portals. We hope this literature review can benefit practitioners in the field of open data and facilitate the discussion of future work.