Mechanized Cultural Reasoning as a Tool to Assess Trust in Virtual Enterprises

The globalized knowledge society generates virtual enterprises that are usually set up and managed on the web, and the new trend is to make the relevant technologies available on intelligent portable devices. The existence of trust is a mandatory condition to make such enterprises successful. Trust has many facets ranging from very theoretical ones to fully heuristic features. One point is that trust can arise when one understands the behavior of the other. In this paper we outline a new technology leading to the possibility to include inter-cultural issues among the factors having a strong impact on trust. This technology is called Abstraction-Based Information Technology. Its goal is to enable to design tools in artificial intelligence to perform so-called cultural reasoning that ensures better trust among inter-cultural communities.