It's a matter of trust
However, doing so requires infrastructural developments that encourage uniformity and compatibility across the board. The only real way to generate these, is through the establishment of pre-agreed principles and targets for the development of synergies between R&D objectives. The iTRUST Working Group on Trust Management in Dynamic Open Systems aimed to establish far more than this. The primary goal of the project was to ascertain a comprehensive forum on a cross disciplinary investigation on trust as a means to establish confidence in the global computing infrastructure. Such "cross-disciplinary" study would originate from a number of perspectives, not just from the application of technical research. Trust would also be investigated from a social, philosophical as well as a legal entity. The ultimate goal would be to make trust a recognisable factor in establishing meaningful and mutually beneficial interactions. To do so, a number of international conferences and workshops were established with the intention of acquiring standardisation cultures. Part of such workshops would be to investigate new types of evidence that could establish automatic reasoning about trust as well as to develop computational trust models. An offspring based on the various workshops and conferences was the drafting of various tutorials that would serve to illustrate the requirements for such systems as well as to elucidate on the practical needs for trust. From providing an introduction on the principles of mathematically expressing levels of trust to defining reputation systems and the application of subjective logic, these tutorials provide comprehensive coverage. Overall, the conferences were earmarked as a successful endeavour, providing enough information and interactivity to gainfully contribute towards the overall understanding of the dynamics involved. As part of the IST programme under the 5th Framework programme the conferences and workshops have generated an interest and more importantly, a fundamental understanding of the necessity for trust.
