Abstract
Trust is a key component of relationships in social life. It is commonly argued that trust is the “glue” that holds families, societies, organizations and companies together. In the literature trust is frequently considered as a strategic asset for organizations. Having a clear understanding of the notion of trust and its components is paramount to both trust assessment and trust management. Although much progress has been made to clarify the ontological nature of trust, the term remains overloaded and there is not yet a shared or prevailing, and conceptually clear notion of trust. In this paper we address this issue by means of an in-depth ontological analysis of the notion of trust, grounded in the Unified Foundational Ontology. As a result, we propose a concrete artifact, namely, the Reference Ontology for Trust, in which we characterize the general concept of trust and distinguish between two types of trust, namely, social trust and institution-based trust. We also represent the emergence of risk from trust relations. In addition, we make a comparative analysis of our Reference Ontology to other trust ontologies. To validate and demonstrate the contribution of our approach, we apply it to model two application examples.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
Once more, OntoUML is a conceptual modeling language whose primitives reflect the ontological distinctions put forth by the UFO ontology [11].
References
Azevedo, C.L.B., et al.: Modeling resources and capabilities in enterprise architecture: a well-founded ontology-based proposal for ArchiMate. Inf. Syst. 54, 235–262 (2015)
Barber, B.: The Logic and Limits of Trust, 1st edn. Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick (1983)
Bresciani, P., Perini, A., Giorgini, P., Giunchiglia, F., Mylopoulos, J.: Tropos: An agent-oriented software development methodology. Auton. Agent. Multi-Agent Syst. 8(3), 203–236 (2004)
Castelfranchi, C., Falcone, R.: Trust Theory: A Socio-Cognitive and Computational Model, vol. 18. Wiley, Hoboken (2010)
Cross, F.B.: Law and trust. Georgetown Law J. 93, 1457 (2005)
Dokoohaki, N., Matskin, M.: Effective design of trust ontologies for improvement in the structure of socio-semantic trust networks. Int. J. Adv. Intell. Syst. 1(1942–2679), 23–42 (2008)
Gambetta, D., et al.: Can we trust trust. In: Trust: Making and Breaking Cooperative Relations, vol. 13, pp. 213–237 (2000)
Gerstl, P., Pribbenow, S.: Midwinters, end games, and body parts: a classification of part-whole relations. Int. J. Hum.-comput. Stud. 43(5–6), 865–889 (1995)
Giorgini, P., Massacci, F., Mylopoulos, J., Zannone, N.: Modeling social and individual trust in requirements engineering methodologies. In: Herrmann, P., Issarny, V., Shiu, S. (eds.) iTrust 2005. LNCS, vol. 3477, pp. 161–176. Springer, Heidelberg (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/11429760_12
Golbeck, J., Parsia, B., Hendler, J.: Trust networks on the semantic web. In: Klusch, M., Omicini, A., Ossowski, S., Laamanen, H. (eds.) CIA 2003. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 2782, pp. 238–249. Springer, Heidelberg (2003). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-45217-1_18
Guizzardi, G.: Ontological foundations for structural conceptual models. Telematica Instituut/CTIT (2005)
Guizzardi, G.: The role of foundational ontologies for conceptual modeling and domain ontology representation. In: 7th International Baltic Conference on Databases and Information Systems, pp. 17–25. IEEE (2006)
Guizzardi, G., Falbo, R.A., Guizzardi, R.S.S.: Grounding software domain ontologies in the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO). In: 11th Ibero-American Conference on Software Engineering (CIbSE), pp. 127–140 (2008)
Guizzardi, G., Wagner, G., Almeida, J.P.A., Guizzardi, R.S.S.: Towards ontological foundations for conceptual modeling: the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO) story. Appl. ontology 10(3–4), 259–271 (2015)
Guizzardi, G., Wagner, G., Falbo, R.A., Guizzardi, R.S.S., Almeida, J.P.A.: Towards ontological foundations for the conceptual modeling of events. In: 32nd International Conference on Conceptual Modeling (ER), pp. 327–341. Springer (2013)
Guizzardi, R.S.S., Guizzardi, G.: Ontology-based transformation framework from TROPOS to AORML. In: Social Modeling for Requirements Engineering, pp. 547–570. The MIT Press, Cambridge (2010)
Huang, J., Fox, M.S.: An ontology of trust: formal semantics and transitivity. In: Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Electronic Commerce: The New E-commerce: Innovations for Conquering Current Barriers, Obstacles and Limitations to Conducting Successful Business on the Internet, pp. 259–270. ACM (2006)
Lewis, J.D., Weigert, A.: Trust as a social reality. Soc. Forces 63(4), 967–985 (1985)
Luhmann, N.: Trust and Power. Wiley, Hoboken (2018)
Mayer, R.C., Davis, J.H., Schoorman, F.D.: An integrative model of organizational trust. Acad. Manag. Rev. 20(3), 709–734 (1995)
McGuinness, D.L., Ding, L., Da Silva, P.P., Chang, C.: Pml 2: A modular explanation interlingua. In: ExaCt, pp. 49–55 (2007)
Harrison McKnight, D., Chervany, N.L.: Trust and distrust definitions: one bite at a time. In: Falcone, R., Singh, M., Tan, Y.-H. (eds.) Trust in Cyber-societies. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 2246, pp. 27–54. Springer, Heidelberg (2001). https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45547-7_3
Moyano, F., Fernandez-Gago, C., Lopez, J.: A conceptual framework for trust models. In: Fischer-Hübner, S., Katsikas, S., Quirchmayr, G. (eds.) TrustBus 2012. LNCS, vol. 7449, pp. 93–104. Springer, Heidelberg (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-32287-7_8
Pribbenow, S.: Meronymic relationships: from classical mereology to complex part-whole relations. In: Green, R., Bean, C.A., Myaeng, S.H. (eds.) The Semantics of Relationships. Information Science and Knowledge Management, vol. 3, pp. 35–50. Springer, Dordrecht (2002)
Rotter, J.B.: A new scale for the measurement of interpersonal trust. J. Pers. 35(4), 651–665 (1967)
Rousseau, D.M., Sitkin, S.B., Burt, R.S., Camerer, C.: Not so different after all: a cross-discipline view of trust. Acad. Manag. Rev. 23(3), 393–404 (1998)
Sales, T.P., Baião, F., Guizzardi, G., Almeida, J.P.A., Guarino, N., Mylopoulos, J.: The common ontology of value and risk. In: Trujillo, J.C., et al. (eds.) ER 2018. LNCS, vol. 11157, pp. 121–135. Springer, Cham (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00847-5_11
Sales, T.P., Guizzardi, G.: “Is it a fleet or a collection of ships?”: ontological anti-patterns in the modeling of part-whole relations. In: Kirikova, M., Nørvåg, K., Papadopoulos, G.A. (eds.) ADBIS 2017. LNCS, vol. 10509, pp. 28–41. Springer, Cham (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66917-5_3
Tyler, T.R.: Why People Obey the Law. Princeton University Press, Princeton (2006)
Viljanen, L.: Towards an ontology of trust. In: Katsikas, S., López, J., Pernul, G. (eds.) TrustBus 2005. LNCS, vol. 3592, pp. 175–184. Springer, Heidelberg (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/11537878_18
Williamson, O.E.: Calculativeness, trust, and economic organization. J. Law Econ. 36(1, Part 2), 453–486 (1993)
Acknowledgment
CAPES (PhD grant# 88881.173022/2018-01) and OCEAN project (UNIBZ).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Amaral, G., Sales, T.P., Guizzardi, G., Porello, D. (2019). Towards a Reference Ontology of Trust. In: Panetto, H., Debruyne, C., Hepp, M., Lewis, D., Ardagna, C., Meersman, R. (eds) On the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems: OTM 2019 Conferences. OTM 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11877. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33246-4_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33246-4_1
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-33245-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-33246-4
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)