Editorial: Trust, value systems and governance in collaborative networks

Various recent developments in Collaborative Networks (CNs) attempt to model a number of aspects that are characterized by an inherent imprecision and incompleteness of information. In fact, collaborative networks are complex entities whose proper understanding, design, implementation, and management require the integration of different modeling perspectives and techniques. Perspectives related to behavior and decision making in face of incomplete and imprecise information are particularly difficult tomodel.CNs involve a large number of autonomous and heterogeneous entities—organizations, people, systems—oftenwith: (i) different value systems, and therefore different perceptions of value and importance/priority of things, and (ii) a behavior that is influenced by factors such as emotions, preferences, working habits, ethical values, level of trust, competences, etc. Some of these aspects have a socio-organizational and anthropocentric nature that is difficult to capture with traditional logic modeling approaches. Complementarily, new reasoning and decision making approaches are being developed resorting to qualitative reasoning and computational intelligence methods. The aim is to offer better approaches to understand and govern collaborative networks in order to maximize the benefits and reduce the risks of these organizational forms. This special issue comprises a selection of papers from the PRO-VE’07 conference, representing examples of relevant work in this direction. The PRO-VE conference series, spon-