New Concepts for Trust Propagation in Knowledge Processing Systems

Everybody has a sense of trusting people or institutions, but how is trust defined? It always depends on the specific field of research and application and is different most of the time, which makes it hard to answer this question in general at a computational level. Thinking on knowledge processing systems we have this question twice. How can we define and calculate trust values for the input data and, much more challenging, what is the trust value of the output? Meeting this challenge we first investigate appropriate ways of defining trust. Within this paper we consider three different existing trust models and a self developed one. Then we show ways, how knowledge processing systems can handle these trust values and propagate them through a network of processing steps in a way that the final results are representative. Therefore we show the propagation of trust with the three existing trust models and with a recently self developed approach, where also precision- and importancevalues are considered. With these models, we can give insights to the topic of defining and propagating trust in knowledge processing systems.