A Framework for Trust and Distrust Networks

In this age of internet and electronic commerce it is becoming increasingly important to have and to manipulate information about the trustworthiness of the content or service providers in order to make informed decisions. This paper explores realistic models of trust and distrust based on partially ordered discrete values and proposes a framework, which is sensitive to local, relative ordering of values rather than their magnitudes. The framework distinguishes between direct and inferred trust, preferring direct information over possibly conflicting inferred information. It also represents ambiguity or inconsistency explicitly. The framework is capable of handling general trust and belief networks containing cycles.