An ontology-based approach to automated trust negotiation

•Ontologies are used to facilitate the semantic interoperability among negotiators.•An ontology for the automated trust negotiation (ATN) framework is defined.•Ontology inference techniques are used to perform ATN policy compliance checking.•A semantically relevant negotiation strategy exploiting the ATN ontology is proposed.

We propose an ontology-based approach to automated trust negotiation (ATN) to establish a common vocabulary for ATN across heterogeneous domains and show how ontologies can be used to specify and implement ATN systems. The components of the ATN framework are expressed in terms of a shared ontology and ontology inference techniques are used to perform ATN policy compliance checking. On this basis, a semantically relevant negotiation strategy (SRNS) is proposed that ensures the success of a negotiation whenever it is semantically possible. We analyze the properties of SRNS and evaluate the performance of the ontology-based ATN.