Deploying trust policies on the semantic web (position paper)

Abstract

Automated services over open distributed systems have been advocated as the future for conducting business. However, in order for such services to be successfully deployed, confidence in the system and its participants needs to established. The use of trust policies and trust management has been proposed to raise the level of trust whilst still maintaining a practical level of automation. To define, deploy and enforce trust policies a level of common vocabulary and understanding between participants needs to be established. The Semantic Web initiative of the W3C has been developing common languages and tools to allow the exchange and processing of common vocabularies, in the form of a graph-based description format, and an ontology language. In this paper we discuss the steps required to establish a policy-based service architecture, discuss the role of the Semantic Web initiative in enabling the practical deployment of this architecture, and highlight the work required to enable this. © Springer-Verlag 2004.