Incorporating Trust into Context-Aware Services

Enabling technologies concerning hardware, networking, and sensing have inspired the development of context-aware IT services. These adapt to the situation of the user, such that service provisioning is specific to his/her corresponding needs. We have seen successful applications of context-aware services in healthcare, well-being, and smart homes. It is, however, always a question what level of trust the users can place in the fulfillment of their needs by a certain IT-service. Trust has two major variants: policy-based, where a reputed institution provides guarantees about the service, and reputation-based, where other users of the service provide insight into the level of fulfillment of user needs. Services that are accessible to a small and known set of users typically use policy-based trust only. Services that have a wide community of users can use reputation-based trust, policy-based trust, or a combination. For both types of trust, however, context awareness poses a problem. Policy-based trust works within certain boundaries, outside of which no guarantees can be given about satisfying the user needs, and context awareness can push a service out of these boundaries. For reputation-based trust, the fact that users in a certain context were adequately served, does not mean that the same would happen when the service adapts to another user’s needs. In this paper we consider the incorporation of trust into context-aware services, by proposing an ontological conceptualization for user-system trust. Analyzing service usage data for context parameters combined with the ability to fulfill user needs can help in eliciting components for the ontology.