Effective Use of Organisational Abstractions for Confidence Models

Trust and reputation systems are not only useful for Virtual Organisations (VOs), but VOs also for trust and reputation mechanisms. The structure provided by a VO can be used to construct more effective trust mechanisms. In particular, the structural elements defined in a VO (e.g., roles and interactions) provide a certain notion of similarity which allows agents to infer the expected behaviour of acquaintances within new situations by analysing their past behaviour within similar situations. This property is especially useful in situations where agents do not yet have sufficient experiences related to a specific type of interaction, or within very volatile environments. In this paper [1] we continue our previous work [2] on trust mechanisms for VOs. We present some experiments that show how the use of organisational abstractions can effectively improve trust mechanisms. We also put forward a testbed developed to compare trust models in VOs (TOAST).