Abstract.Trust is an important tool in human life, as it enables people to cope with the uncertainty caused by the free will of others. Uncertainty and uncontrollability are also issues in computer-assisted collaboration and electronic commerce in particular. A computational model of trust and its implementation can alleviate this problem.This survey is directed to an audience wishing to familiarize themselves with the field, for example to locate a research target or implement a trust management system. It concentrates on providing a general overview of the state of the art, combined with examples of things to take into consideration both when modelling trust in general and building a solution for a certain phase in trust management, be it trust relationship initialization, updating trust based on experience or determining what trust should have an effect on.

Electronic markets, distributed peer-to-peer applications and other forms of online collaboration are all based on mutual trust, which enables transacting peers to overcome the uncertainty and risk inherent in the environment. Reputation systems provide essential input for computational trust as predictions on future behaviour based on the past actions of a peer. In order to analyze the maturity of current reputation systems, we compare eleven reputation systems within a taxonomy of the credibility aspects of a reputation system. The taxonomy covers three topics: 1) the creation and content of a recommendation, 2) the selection and use of recommenders, and 3) the interpretation and reasoning applied to the gathered information. Although we find it possible to form a trusted reputation management network over an open network environment, there are still many regulatory and technical obstacles to address. This survey reveals various good mechanisms and methods used, but the area still requires both a) formation of standard mechanisms and metrics for reputation system collaboration and b) standard metainformation of right granularity for evaluating the credibility of reputation information provided.

The increasing pressure for enterprises to join into agile business networks is changing the requirements on the enterprise computing systems. The supporting infrastructure is increasingly required to provide common facilities and societal infrastructure services to support the lifecycle of loosely-coupled, eContract-governed business networks. The required facilities include selection of those autonomously administered business services that the enterprises are prepared to provide and use, contract negotiations, and furthermore, monitoring of the contracted behaviour with potential for breach management. The essential change is in the requirement of a clear mapping between business-level concepts and the automation support for them. Our work has focused on developing B2B middleware to address the above challenges; however, the architecture is not feasible without management facilities for trust-aware decisions for entering business networks and interacting within them. This paper discusses how trust-based decisions are supported and positioned in the B2B middleware.

Abstract. The agility to collaborate in several business networks has become essential for the success of enterprises. The dynamic nature of collaborations and the autonomy of enterprises creates new challenges for the operational computing environment. This paper describes the web-Pilarcos B2B middleware solutions for managing the life-cycle of dynamic business networks in an inter-enterprise environment. The use of B2B middleware moves the management challenges away from the individual enterprise applications to more global infrastructure services, and provides a level of automation into the establishment and maintenance. The middleware services aim for a rigorous level of transparent interoperability support, including awareness of collaboration processes, and collaboration level adaptation to breaches in operation.

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Participation in electronic business networks has become necessary for the success of enterprises. The strategic business needs for participating in multiple networks simultaneously and for managing changes in these networks are reected as new requirements for the supporting computing facilities. The Pilarcos architecture addresses the needs of managed collaboration and interoperability of autonomous business services in an inter-organisational context. The Pilarcos B2B middleware is designed for lowering the cost and eort of collaboration establishment and to facilitate the management and maintenance of electronic business networks. The approach is a federated one: All business services are developed independently, and the provided B2B middleware services are used to ensure that technical, semantic, and pragmatic interoperability is maintained in the business network. In the architecture and middleware functionality design, attention has been given to the dynamic aspects and evolution of the network. This article discusses the concepts provided for application and business network creators, and the supporting middleware-level knowledge repositories for interoperability support.

Abstract-Enterprise computing is moving towards more open, collaborative systems. Joining a business network must be made efficient, despite the technical and semantic interoperability challenges involved in connecting different information and communication systems. Trust or lack thereof forms a pragmatic challenge: partners must continuously evaluate whether they trust each other enough to collaborate in the face of risk. Supporting technology is needed for making trust-based decisions on routine business transactions and observing the business peers for malicious or incorrect behaviour on interactions. We present a trust model for automating routine decision-making which considers both risk probabilities and tolerance valuations in the enterprise, and is dynamically updated based on new experience gathered both locally and from third parties.

Participation in electronic business networks has become necessary for the success of enterprises. The strategic business needs for participating multiple networks simultaneously and for managing changes in these networks are reflected as new requirements for the supporting computing facilities. The web-Pilarcos architecture addresses the needs of managed collaboration and interoperability of autonomous business services in an inter-organisational context. The web-Pilarcos B2B middleware is designed for lowering the cost of collaboration establishment and to facilitate management and maintenance of electronic business networks. The approach is a federated one: All business services are developed independently, and the B2B middleware services are used to ensure that technical, semantic, and pragmatic interoperability is maintained in the business network. In the architecture and middleware functionality design, attention has been given to the dynamic aspects and evolution of the network. This paper discusses the concepts provided for application and business network creators, and the supporting middleware-level knowledge repositories for interoperability support.