Assessing Information Trustability in a Secure Web Services Environment

Decisions are made based on available information. A decision support system endeavors to provide information that is timely, accurate, and trustable.Information gathered from secure web service transactions has attributes that can be used to assess a level of trustability. The trust assessments enable adecision maker to determine a basis for confidence in the information presented from the web service. Existing trust assessment models do not provide away to determine from a particular trust assessment what information attributes contributed to its computation. The present work creates trust values thatretain and denote meaning, allowing a decision maker to see specifically what factors influenced the information trust assessment. Also central to this workis interpretation of the trust assessments. The interpretation model allows users to specify the amount of allowable tolerance for reduced trustability in thedecision being made. This "dial-a-trust" allows the interpretation to be scaled relative to the impact of the decision. The trust assessment values, along withtheir interpretations, allow both human and machine-based decision makers to determine whether information is trustable enough for the needs of thedecision being made.