Affiliations: Department of Computer Science, Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida 32306, USA
Correspondence:
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Corresponding author: Daniel Schwartz, Department of Computer Science, Mail Code 4530, Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida 32306, USA. Tel.: +1 850 644 5875; Fax: +1 850 644 0058; E-mail: schwartz@cs.fsu.edu
Abstract: The newly envisioned Semantic Web contains as a component what may be called a Web of Trust, consisting of the trust relationships held between its participants. In terms of this, the degree to which participant A believes what is believed by participant B depends on the degree to which A trusts B. This paper presents a formal language with well-defined semantics within which such a participant (or agent) can express the relevant conditions of belief and trust, and outlines some key techniques for reasoning with these expressions. Novel in this treatment is the use of linguistic, rather than numeric, measures of belief. The aim in this is to make the language and reasoning system more intuitive for the human user. Also novel is an explicit delineation of the context within which the language and reasoning techniques are to be applied. The notion of a dynamic reasoning system is applied to model the agent’s knowledge acquisition and belief revision processes as activities that take place in time.
