A Classification Scheme for Trust Functions in Reputation-Based Trust Management

Reputation is an important means to establish trust in decentralized environments such as the Semantic Web. In reputation-based trust management, an entity’s reputation is usually built on feedback from those who have direct interactions with the entity. A trust function is used to infer one’s trustworthiness based on such feedback. Many trust functions have been proposed in the literature. They are typically designed for specific application domains, thus differ in a variety of aspects, including trust inference methodologies, complexity and accuracy. In this paper, we propose a classification scheme for trust functions, which will help the systematic analysis and selection of trust functions for particular applications.