Modeling and Estimation of knowledge-based Trust in Organizational Knowledge Flow

Modeling and estimation of trust helps organizations to implement secure knowledge management using trust-based access control of knowledge assets in knowledge sharing. Trust and knowledge flow have a bidirectional cause and effect relationship. Increase or decrease in the value of trust between subjects that are involved in a knowledge flow, results in high or low performance of flow respectively. On the other hand, a high or low performed knowledge flow can increase or decrease the value of trust between subjects involved. In this paper, a method and an algorithm for modeling and estimating the value of trust is proposed. When a knowledge flow is done, each knowledge worker’s feedback toward other knowledge worker is gathered and a credit corresponding to gathered feedbacks is assigned to inter-individuals’ trust which may have an increasing or decreasing effect on the previous value. Then the effect on trust value between the individuals propagates to their respective groups and organizations. Such propagation allows to estimate the trust value not only between individuals but also between other subjects such as organizational groups, non-organizational groups, and organizations. The proposed model is evaluated by two simulated scenarios.

Keywords:

Trust , Secure Knowledge Management , Knowledge Flow , Modeling , Simulation