Towards an Ontology of Trust

Trust is a fundamental factor when people are interacting with each other, hence it is natural that trust has been researched also in relation to applications and agents. However, there is no single definition of trust that everybody would share. This, in turn, has caused a multitude of formal or computational trust models to emerge to enable trust use and dependence in applications. Since the field is so diverse, there also exists a confusion of terminology, where similar concepts have different names and, what is more disturbing, same terms are also used for different concepts. To organize the research models in a new and more structured way, this paper surveys and classifies thirteen computational trust models by the trust decision input factors. This analysis is used to create a new comprehensive ontology for trust to facilitate interaction between business systems.