About Us
TrustFinder is being developed by a multidisciplinary group of information reliability practitioners and researchers. The group convened as part of a cohort of a US National Science Foundation Convergence Accelerator program that is seeking to address issues of trust and authenticity in communications. Our core TrustFinder development team includes the University of Washington Applied Physics Laboratory, and the companies MATTR and iProov.
What is Trustfinder?
TrustFinder enables researchers to reduce the negative impacts on their work of misinformation and other symptoms of the lack of integrity in online communications. With TrustFinder, researchers can interact with greater confidence, and produce more reliable research for academic, commercial and policy applications.
Why Do We Need Trustfinder?
New tools are required to help people of all walks of life to judge the information they receive. We all rely on experts and researchers to help us to make sense of complex topics, but even they are drowning in information.
How Can TrustFinder Help?
TrustFinder is an application that provides a Verified Information Environment (VIE) for researchers. TrustFinder enables researchers to collaboratively enrich and link information at its source using web and document annotation. Annotations are not just comments, but structured communications designed as part of a crowdsourcing solution that enables search and summarization functions. These functions help researchers share knowledge, stay up-to-date, and move beyond search by keyword.
What Makes TrustFinder Different?
TrustFinder uses genuine presence testing and a digital wallet tied to real-world credentials to create a VIE free of bots and disruptive actors. This allows users to enrich, add, and link information anywhere on the web – allowing them to contribute to a ‘lens’ on the internet that only their community can see. An Open Standards approach means that underlying architecture can be used outside of research as well.
