[CostAT] Trust as a Unifying Basis for Social Computing

by Munindar Signh

Trust underlies all interactions among autonomous parties over many social relationships: casual, familiar, communal, organizational, practical…. But trust it use to be a internal characteristics and it can not be extrapolated outside a single application.

A social applications specifies and configure (i) roles,, (Ii) social interactions and (iii) additional constraints. And the elements we have available to model these systems (architecture) are components, connectors, constraints (over both of them) and patterns (that generalize its behavior). In the case of a social systems, they are
components >> individuals
connector >> social relationships
constraint >> reciprocal (ej Facebook)
patterns >> ….

The claim of this presentations is that trust is what flues in the relationships and it is how individuals and social relationships can be characterized. The sample> an agent (Toto) that acts as a middleware and can provide with trust the interactions among real people in different applications. That is, a layer which can be used in social apps (for instance) to measure the confidence on other users (humans) interactions (NOTE. a very close concept to the trust bundle proposed in AT)