Re: more text / Trust bipolar decision or continuum

We tend to see trust as a bipolar decision by an agent. You trust a graph or
you don't trust it. This conflicts with the view of the majority of trust
researchers, who see trust as a continuum.

See quote from one of my documents below:
"There is a wide range of different trust definitions known from physiology,
sociology, economic science and computer science. There is no general
agreement on the term "Trust". A comparison of the different views on the
topic and the different trust definitions can be found in [Marsh94] and
[Gambetta00]. Following Joseph M. Reagle [Reagle02], we define trust as:
Trust (worthiness) is the degree to which an agent (human or machine)
considers information to be true for a given time and context.
Our definition refers to the following aspects of trust:
-There is uncertainty in trust situations, which cannot be eliminated. It is
only possible to minimize uncertainty.
-Trust is subjective. Different users have different views of the world and
different subjective trust requirements in the same situation.
-Trust depends on the context and changes over time.
-Trust in a continuum and no bivariate property. "

This conflicts with what we write in  Chapter 4:

"The meaning of a set of named graphs depends on a separate decision about
which of the graphs to accept. We represent this decision as a set A of
nodes naming the accepted graphs. The meaning of a set of accepted named
graphs hA,Ni is given by taking the graph merge Sa2A N(a), and then
interpreting that graph using the semantics of RDF[?]. Any extension
semantics of RDF can be used; in this paper we uniformly use those of OWL
Full[4]."

I totally agree with Jeremy, that for practical reasons we should have a
bipolar view on trust in the context of the Semantic Web at it's current
state of development. But the interesting question is: Is this bipolar view
required for RDF semantics or OWL to work or can we be open to agents using
continuum based trust models (modal logic ??) ?

I don't mandate, that we should include this stuff in the paper, but it
would be nice if our approach wouldn't exclude future agents that might use
continuum based trust models (and will have the unlimited processing power
to reason based on these models :-). In addition it would make our work less
attackable for the trust community.

Chris

Received on Tuesday, 16 March 2004 09:57:00 UTC