Abstract
Trust has stood out more than ever in the light of recent innovations. Some examples are advances in artificial intelligence that make machines more and more humanlike, and the introduction of decentralized technologies (e.g. blockchains), which creates new forms of (decentralized) trust. These new developments have the potential to improve the provision of products and services, as well as to contribute to individual and collective well-being. However, their adoption depends largely on trust. In order to build trustworthy systems, along with defining laws, regulations and proper governance models for new forms of trust, it is necessary to properly conceptualize trust, so that it can be understood both by humans and machines. This paper is the culmination of a long-term research program of providing a solid ontological foundation on trust, by creating reference conceptual models to support information modeling, automated reasoning, information integration and semantic interoperability tasks. To address this, a Reference Ontology of Trust (ONTrust) was developed, grounded on the Unified Foundational Ontology and specified in OntoUML, which has been applied in several initiatives, to demonstrate, for example, how it can be used for conceptual modeling and enterprise architecture design, for language evaluation and (re)design, for trust management, for requirements engineering, and for trustworthy artificial intelligence (AI) in the context of affective Human-AI teaming. ONTrust formally characterizes the concept of trust and its different types, describes the different factors that can influence trust, as well as explains how risk emerges from trust relations. To illustrate the working of ONTrust, the ontology is applied to model two case studies extracted from the literature.
Abstract (translated)
近期的创新使信任的重要性愈加凸显。例如，人工智能的进步使得机器越来越像人类，并且去中心化技术（如区块链）的引入创造了新的信任形式。这些新发展有可能改善产品和服务的提供，同时也有助于个人和集体福祉的提升。然而，它们的应用在很大程度上依赖于信任的存在。为了构建可信赖的系统，除了定义适用于新型信任形式的相关法律、法规及合适的治理模式外，还需要准确地界定信任的概念，以便人类与机器都能理解它。本文是一系列长期研究项目的成果，旨在为信任提供坚实的本体论基础，通过创建参考概念模型来支持信息建模、自动化推理、信息集成和语义互操作性任务。 为此，开发了一种基于统一基础本体论，并用OntoUML详细规定的“信任参考本体”（ONTrust）。此本体已经在多个倡议中得到应用，例如用于概念建模和企业架构设计、语言评估与重新设计、信任管理、需求工程以及情感人机团队协作背景下的可信人工智能。ONTrust形式化地描述了信任的概念及其不同种类，并阐述了影响信任的不同因素，同时解释了如何从信任关系中产生风险。 为了展示ONTrust的工作原理，将此本体应用于两个取材于文献的案例研究建模之中。
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.07662
