Context-aware Trustworthiness Evaluation with Indirect Knowledge

Commonly, when a Trustor evaluates a Trustee’s trustworthi ness, it is assumed that the evaluation is based on information direc tly available to the Trustor. This can concern for example the reputation and rec ommendations characterizing the Trustee. In cases of context-aware trust, th i is further restricted by concentrating mainly on information in a similar enough con text as is effective at trust evaluation time. However, this information is not nec essarily available to the Trustor. Surprisingly, in such scenarios the literature su ggests either to wait for someone else to collect the needed experience, or to trust bl indly. In this paper, we discuss solutions that help the Trustor to conduct its eva luation even if direct knowledge about the Trustee is lacking. We approach this by a llowing the Trustor to make use of networks connecting the Trustor and the Truste e, as well as the context information characterizing the entities appearin g in these networks.