Assessment of the trustworthiness of digital records

Abstract

It is easy enough to assert the trustworthiness or otherwise of a digital record, but it is far more difficult to present an objective basis for that assertion. A number of recent research efforts have focused on the trustworthiness of a digital record while paying scant attention to the record's evidential value as a measure of and a basis for the assessment of its trustworthiness. In this work, we study a model for the assessment of the trustworthiness of digital records based on their evidential values using the Dempster-Shafer (D-S) theory. The model is divided into three modules, (i) a knowledge-modelling module that models expert knowledge and consequent belief of evidence, (ii) an evidence-combination module that combines evidence from different sources in the face of uncertainty, and (iii) a trustworthiness assessment module that aggregates and integrates evidence, and assesses its trustworthiness. An example is presented to show how the model works. © 2011 International Federation for Information Processing.