A map of trust between trading partners

A pair of 'trust maps' give a fine-grained view of an agent's accumulated, time-discounted belief that the enactment of commitments by another agent will be in-line with what was promised, and that the observed agent will act in a way that respects the confidentiality of previously passed information. The structure of these maps is defined in terms of a categorisation of utterances and the ontology. Various summary measures are then applied to these maps to give a succinct view of trust. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2008.