A multi-faceted model of trust that is personalisable and specialisable

Abstract

Trust is a term that is open to a wide range of subjective interpretations, and it has therefore been argued that “trust is a fashionable but overloaded term with lots of intertwined meanings” [Gollmann, 2005]. To date, many varied synonyms for trust have been used to describe trust, which has led to a wide range of definitions for trust. With this wide and varied range of synonyms and definitions for trust it has come to pass that there is no real consensus as to the meaning of trust. Current state of the art in the area of trust management tends to use a single synonym, or definition, in their use of trust. For example, eBay uses a reputation based feedback system. Such a single synonym approach can only provide a generic, non-personalised trust management solution. This thesis proposes a multi-faceted model of trust that is personalisable and specialisable. A multi-faceted approach can be used to provide a personalised model of trust that has the ability to capture an individual’s subjective view of trust and, at the same time, also capture the wide variety of subjective views of trust that are exhibited by individuals over a large and broad population. Such personalisation is currently not found within trust management research in computer science. Personalisation of this type within trust is a means to enhance trust management by providing a tailored and bespoke model of trust. The model of trust is also specialisable towards multiple application domains in order to reflect a domain’s classes, properties, relationships, and attributes. In this way trust management is not only personalised to the user but is it also specialised to the application domain. To evaluate and validate this approach to modelling trust, several experiments were conducted and detailed analysis of the results is presented. In addition, a trust management service, called myTrust , has been implemented and combined with an advanced policy based management system to illustrate dynamic and flexible trust management across several diverse application domains.