A Trust Ontology for Business Collaborations

There are currently some ontologies of business collaboration that facilitate automated collaboration, such as evalue, REA, and BMO. However, these ontologies model the situation that all business actors can be trusted. This is not true in practice. To realize automated business collaboration, trust needs to be added to the business ontology. In this paper, we extend the evalue ontology with the concept of trust and show how this can be used to reason about trust on actors in a business network. We take a minimal approach, i.e. rather than adding all the nuances of the concept of trust, we provide the minimal extension that allows an actor to reason about trusting other actors in a useful way. We end the paper with a discussion of how this approach can be generalized to other approaches.