Fuzzy-based Trust Measurement for CoPs in Knowledge Management Systems

The importance of communities of practice(CoP) as an organizational informal unit for fostering knowledge transfer and sharing gains a lot of attention from KM researchers and practitioners. Since most of CoPs are formulated online these days, the credibility or trustworthiness of knowledge contents circulated within a certain CoP should be considered thoroughly for them to be fully utilized safely. Here comes the need for an appropriate trust measuring methodology to determine the true value of knowledge given by unknown people through an online channel. In this paper, an improved trust measuring method is proposed using new trust variables such as level of degrees derived from the relationships among community users. In addition, activeness, relevance, and usefulness of the knowledge contents themselves, which are calculated automatically using a text categorization technique, are also used for trust measurement. The proposed framework incorporates fuzzy set and calculation concepts to help build trust matrices and models, which are used to measure the level of trust involved in specific knowledge artifacts concerned.