VIeTE - Enabling Trust Emergence in Service-oriented Collaborative Environments

In activity-centric environments where people from different companies and disciplines work remotely together and where new virtual teams are formed and dissolved continuously, how to find the most suitable collaboration partner for a given task and how well one partner is able to collaborate with another one are challenging research questions. Determining and considering people’s professional competencies, collaboration behavior and relationships is a prerequisite to enhance the overall collaboration performance and success, because these factors highly impact on the notion of trust used to select and grade partners. In this paper we analyze these factors and their impact on trust relationships in modern service-oriented collaboration environments. We present VieTE, a framework for trust emergence therein supporting the analysis of trust between partners in various contexts and from different views. In contrast to other approaches, which mostly rely on manual and subjective user feedback, VieTE monitors automatically collaboration efforts and deduces trust between any two partners based on past collaboration, previous successes, and individual competencies.