A Closer Look on Conceptual Modeling of Trust to Develop TrustMan system

Designing comprehensive trust models and mechanisms to address challenges related to mediating business oriented collaboration among organizations has become a fundamental focus of research on trust and particularly those focused on organizational Trust Management (TrustMan) Systems. Despite recent achievements from research addressing the modeling of trust, there are still insufficient generic and customizable models, mechanisms and tools to support emerging requirements on inter-organizational trust analysis. Most available model solutions supporting trust analysis are limited to: a specific application case (e.g. multi-agent systems), known actors (organizations or individuals), or domain of study (e.g. health domain). These solutions are also limited to some specific set of trust criteria applied to their development such as a small set of trust criteria for analysis of rational trust in organization. In this article we advocate that a large number of elements must be properly specified and modeled to comprehensively cover the trust objectives of organizations towards developing a supportive TrustMan system. This article analyzes and proposes three specific modeling formalisms that best represent trust relationships among organizations and presents some examples for those formalisms. It also analyzes classes of models of inter-organizational trust, namely: hard models, soft models and semi-soft models.