A scale based trust model for multi-context environments

When interactions among users of a system have to take place, for example, over the internet, establishing trust relationships among these users becomes crucial. However, the way this trust is established depends to a certain extent on the context where the interactions take place. Most of the time, trust is encoded as a numerical value that might not be very meaningful for a not very experienced user. In this paper we propose a model that takes into account the semantic and the computational sides of trust. This avoids users having to deal directly with the computational side: they instead deal with meaningful labels such as Bad or Good in a given context. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.