A model to rate trust in communities of practice

Communities of Practice are an important centre of knowledge exchange in which feelings such as membership or trust play a significant role since both is the basis for a suitable sharing of knowledge. However, current Communities of Practice are often "virtual" as their members may be geographically distributed. This makes it more difficult for a feeling of trust to take place. In this paper we describe a trust model designed to help software agents, which represent communities of practice members, to rate how trustworthy a knowledge source is. It is important to clarify that we also consider members as knowledge sources since, in fact, they are the most important knowledge providers.