Date of Award

3-2005

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science

Department

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

First Advisor

Michael L. Talbert, PhD

Abstract

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 a decision maker to determine a basis for confidence in the information presented from the web service. Existing trust assessment models do not provide a way to determine from a particular trust assessment what information attributes contributed to its computation. The present work creates trust values that retain and denote meaning, allowing a decision maker to see specifically what factors influenced the information trust assessment. Also central to this work is interpretation of the trust assessments. The interpretation model allows users to specify the amount of allowable tolerance for reduced trustability in the decision being made. This "dial-a-trust" allows the interpretation to be scaled relative to the impact of the decision. The trust assessment values, along with their interpretations, allow both human and machine-based decision makers to determine whether information is trustable enough for the needs of the decision being made.

AFIT Designator

AFIT-GCS-ENG-05-14

DTIC Accession Number

ADA431407

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