Computational Trust - History

History

Computational Trust applies the human notion of trust into the digital world, that is seen as malicious rather than cooperative. The expected benefits, according to Marsh et al., result in an exploitation of others' ability through delegation and in an achievement of more cooperation in an open and less protected environment. The scientific research in the area of computational mechanism for trust and reputation in virtual societies is oriented to increase the reliability and performance of electronic communities.

A trust-based decision in a specific domain is a multi-stage process. The first step of this process consists in identifying and selecting the proper input data, that is, the trust evidences. In general, these are domain-specific and they result from an analysis conducted over the application involved. In the next step, a trust computation is performed over evidences to produce Trust values, that means the estimation of the trustworthiness of entities in that particular domain. The selection of evidences and the subsequent trust computation are informed by a notion of Trust, defined in the Trust model. Finally, the trust decision is taken by considering the computed values and exogenous factors, like disposition or risk assessments.