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The distinctive feature of this type of applications is that collaboration, trust, and
information sharing are tightly coupled and mutually influence each other over
extended courses of collaborative activities. These unique characteristics impose new
challenges and demand drastically different approaches for trust management.
Existing trust management tools for such applications has shown to be cumbersome
and are seldom used in real-world applications. Network configuration parameters systems, such as
PolicyMaker[8], KeyNote[7], and Trust-ç [5], are merely dealing with generic
language and mechanisms for specifying and evaluating security policies, credentials,
and relationships. They are almost exclusively designed for business transaction
applications where stable and uniform policies for security and access control can be
enforced. However, managing trust in the contexts of collaboration and information
sharing activities is fundamentally different because the meaning of trust always in
flux with the situation of the collaboration. Trust is part of the bigger 'picture' of
collaborative activities, and can not be understood outside of that context. Methods
for supporting this form of trust management must make explicit connection between
trust communication and the on-going collaborative activities. For this reason, we
need a unified and coherent theory about trust and collaboration, which can serve as
the basis for developing computational methods of trust management.
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