There are currently some ontologies of business collaboration that facilitate automated collaboration, such as e3value, REA, and BMO. However, these ontologies model the situation that all business actors can be trusted. This is not true in practice. To realize automated business collaboration, trust needs to be added to the business ontology. In this paper, we extend the e3value ontology with the concept of trust and show how this can be used to reason about trust on actors in a business network. We take a minimal approach, i.e. rather than adding all the nuances of the concept of trust, we provide the minimal extension that allows an actor to reason about trusting other actors in a useful way. We end the paper with a discussion of how this approach can be generalized to other approaches.
Nowadays, the networks that enterprises operate in, become increasingly complex. There are many reasons for this. Among others we can refer to more advanced user needs, upward tendency toward specialization, changing customer demands, higher customer satisfaction criteria, advancement in information and communication technology (ICT), globalization of markets and manufacturing, increasing competitiveness, exposure to a bigger audience, etc. In fact, collaboration of di erent enterprises to co-produce a product or service is nothing new, however, here in this paper, we focus only on those business collaborations which are facilitated by ICT. In other words, we are concerned with the design and use of IT in IT-enabled business collaborations.
A collaborative network is a network consisting of a set of autonomous actors
(e.g. enterprises, organizations and people) that collaborate to achieve common
or compatible goals [
In a collaborative network each enterprise contributes with its own speci c products or services to satisfy the consumer need. The model which shows the creation, distribution, and consumption of goods or services of economic value in such a network is called value model. The main goal of the value modeling is to reach agreement amongst pro t-and-loss responsible actors regarding the question "Who is o ering what of value to whom and expects what of value in return?" It also enables the actors to assess their potential pro tability in the collaborative network and develop an insight into the economical viability and sustainability of the whole collaborative network. The value model assumes that all partners in the business web behave in accordance with the rules and promises expressed in it (they do not act opportunistically). However, the risk in any business network is that a partner will not behave according to the rules and promises and act in favor of its own goals, to the detriment of other partners' goals. This forces a business to take appropriate and su cient measures against those who it does not trust, i.e. who may not live up to its commitments.
In fact, for doing any business in the real world, trust is crucial for the success of the business, because, after all, we need to trust at least some actors, such as a bank or other trusted third parties. This basically means trust is an inevitable concept in business collaborations. Here in this paper we propose an ontology for business collaborations by enriching the e3value ontology with trust and risk related concepts.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. First, in section 2, we discuss the related work and then in section 3 we brie y introduce the e3value business ontology/methodology. After that, in section 4, we introduce a trust ontology for business collaboration settings based on the e3value business ontology. We conclude the paper in section 5. 2
An ontology is de ned as "a speci cation of a conceptualization." [
In [
Andersson et al. [
Chang et al. [
Haung and Fox [
E3value Business Methodology
The e3value methodology [
An e3value model consists of a graphic part and a computational part. The
graphic part is a diagram and the computational part is a spreadsheet with
algorithms that can perform Net Present Value (NPV) estimations for the
participating actors to assess their potential pro tability in the business collaboration
over a speci c period. In the e3value methodology, we model a collaborative
network as a graph in which the nodes represent economic actors and the edges
represent economic value transfers. In addition, an e3value model shows how a
consumer need is met by a set of economic exchanges between actors in this web
[
E3value Ontology Consider the simple e3value model (Figure 1) in which Buyer gives Money to Seller and receives Good in return. Seller, in turn, gives Money to Transporter and receives Transport. This simple model illustrates the following modeling constructs of e3value: { Contract Period. A value model describes economic exchanges during a speci c period of time, which is called contract period. The contract period should be speci ed in supporting documentation and the model will be used to analyze economic sustainability during this period only. { Actor. An actor is an independent economic (and often also legal) entity with a speci c interest in the collaboration (making pro t, increasing utility, earning experience, ...). Actors in Figure 1 are Buyer, Seller and Transporter. The actor for whom the business web is made to satisfy his needs is called the consumer. We represent the consumer need by a bullet placed inside this actor (Buyer in Figure 1). { Value Object. A value object is a service, good, money, or experience, that is of economic value to at least one actor and that is exchanged between actors.
In our example value objects are Money, Good, Money and Transport.
{ Value Port. An actor uses a value port to provide or request value objects
to or from other actors. A value port is a conceptual construct indicating
that during the contract period, an actor is capable of giving or receiving a
value object. Value ports are represented by small triangles on the edge of
the shapes representing actors.
{ Value Interface. Value interfaces group value ports and indicate atomicity: if
one value port in the interface is triggered in the contract period, all of them
are triggered in this period (however the model makes no statement about
when this will happen: this has to be speci ed in a corresponding
coordination model). Value interfaces are represented by oval shapes surrounding the
value ports.
{ Value Exchange. A value exchange is used to connect two value ports with
each other. It represents one or more potential trades of value object
instances between value ports.
{ Value transaction. The concept of value transaction is used to aggregate
all value exchanges between two actors to indicate that all value exchanges
should occur or none at all.
{ Market Segment. A market segment is a set of actors that assign economic
value to objects equally. They are shown as overlapping rectangles.
{ Dependency Path. In most cases an actor has multiple value interfaces and
these value interfaces can be related. A dependency path connects value
interfaces of the same actor together, meaning that if one of the value
interfaces is triggered the connected value interfaces also must be triggered
[
Figure 2, which is taken from [
In e3value methodology, after modeling a business case, the value model is attributed with quantitative estimations (for example, the number of consumer needs per contract period and the monetary values of exchanged objects) and a contract period. Then, the revenue of each actor in the speci ed contract period, is estimated by subtracting the amount of money which the actor loses from the amount of money which he earns during that period. Strictly speaking, the amount of money that a business actor loses in a speci c period, is the amount of the monetary value of all value objects which he provides for other actors during that period and likewise, the amount of money that a business actor earns in a speci c period, is the amount of the monetary value of all value objects which he receives from other actors during that period.
The result of this simple calculation is the rst indication whether the model at hand can be economically pro table for each actor or not. However, even if the results show a pro table collaboration for all actors, it does not necessarily mean that the collaboration would be pro table in the real world. Because, this calculations are based on the assumption that all business actors are trusted and they all respect the agreements. Hence, to re ne the pro tability analysis and to make the calculations more precise, we need to drop the trust assumptions and then re ne the pro tability analysis by taking trust into account. 4
Trust is a ubiquitous phenomenon in everyone's life. For example when we cross a street we trust the drivers to a certain extent that they follow the tra c rules. Trust exists inherently and latently in all our actions that we might even not be fully aware of that. This is the reason why it is overlooked in many cases and most of the time, people take it for granted. Nevertheless trust has a major impact on our decisions.
In business settings, trust plays even a more important role because in
contrast to the social settings in business settings a misplaced trust might result
in nancial loss and after all, nancial pro t is the main thing that matters in
business settings. Hence, we need to identify the trust factor and evaluate the
nancial risks that it might create and be fully aware of them before making a
decision in the business collaborations. Nevertheless, trust is inevitable and in
doing any business activity, actors need to trust some other actors and as
Kenneth J. Arrow [26, page 24] pointed out without trust no market could function
and there is an element of trust in every transaction. In addition, as Luhmann
[
Here, we aim at designing a meta-model for trust ontology in business
collaborations. To do that, we use the practical recommendation of a noble sociologist,
Howard Becker [
Our goal is to extend e3value ontology with the minimal ontology of trust to be able to usefully reason about trust in a business network. So, we do not want to express all possible meanings of trust, nor do we want to add to the literature on the meanings of "trust" one more bit of insight. We simply want to extend the e3value ontology to make it more realistic in the intended settings, that of business networks.
By analyzing di erent business interactions in di erent case studies and also by studying the existing trust ontologies we identi ed the major trust related concepts in business collaborations. Then, by delineating the relations between those concepts, we developed a lightweight ontology which contains the minimal set of trust related concepts in business settings. The ontology is shown in Figure 3. The shaded concepts are those of the e3value ontology and the rest are the new added concepts. For brevity, we exclude those concepts of the e3value ontology which are not directly related to new added concepts. According to this ontology, a trust relation between two business partners is as follows:
A business actor (Trustor) trusts another business actor (Trustee) with a speci c con dence (Con dence value). The con dence value is in the range [0; 1] and it is calculated based on (1) the reputation (business pro le) of Trustee or (2) direct trust ( past experiences / collaborations between the two actors) or 3) indirect trust (the value of the trust of other business actors in the collaboration with Trustee i.e. collaborative trust). A combination of all these three factors is also imaginable.
In fact, Trustor expects Trustee to accomplish a certain action during a speci c period of time (Time Slot) with agreed upon quality/conditions. In a business collaboration context, this action is transferring a speci c value object (Value Transfer) with explicit quality speci cations in a speci ed time slot. There is a risk associated with every trust relation which means in case Trustee does not ful ll the agreement (transferring the value object with agreed upon quality), it will result in a nancial loss for Trustor. The setting of the relation is described in the value model of the business collaboration.
The nancial losses associated with the trust relations originate from the value objects and their monetary values. But, how can we calculate the nancial loss associated with each business actor? One way to do it is to investigate each value exchange and evaluate the nancial loss associated with that value exchange. Each value exchange indicates two business actors that are exchanging value objects with each other.
The nancial loss which a business actor might incur, is the case in which that business actor receives a value object with less value than what he was expecting according to the agreements and the worst case is the one in which a business actor provides his partner with a value object according to the agreements, but his partner does not give him anything back. This happens because a business actor trusts another business actor but the trustee acts opportunistically.
The crucial question here is, how often does this happen and consequently how much loss should a business actor expect during the collaboration? According to the trustor's expectation, the probability of the trustee to act opportunistically is (1 T ), where T is the value of trust (con dence value) of the trustor in the trustee. Strictly speaking, the potential nancial loss of a trust relation is (1 T ) V , where T is the value of trust (con dence value) and V is the monetary value of the agreed upon value object. Here we assume the total loss of value object V in case the trustor acts opportunistically, which is obviously the worst case.
In fact, this is not the worst case, because in some cases a business actor invests a considerable amount of money in the collaboration with another business actor in the hopes of many value exchanges. However, the other actor misuses the trust early at the collaboration or even at the very beginning and in this special case the nancial loss of the trustor actor would be much more than the monetary value of the single lost value object. After introducing the trust concept, we would like to explain the way in which it can be used with the e3value methodology. To do that, we summarize our three previous papers which deal with the issue of trust in business collaborations.
The rst step is to develop a method to assess/calculate and quantify the
trust relations between actors in a business collaboration. To do that, in [
To measure the value of the trust of the trustor in the trustee, trustor uses
(1) its own opinion based on reputation or past experiences and (2) the opinions
of other direct partners of the trustee in the collaboration, because in case the
trustee has a trust problem with any of its partners, it might break their relation
and consequently the whole collaboration will collapse since the collaboration
works only as a whole. Therefore, it is necessary for the trustor to take the trust
of the direct partners of the trustee into account. For more details regarding
the way in which we identify and measure the trust relations in a business
collaboration interested readers are referred to [
After measuring and quantifying the trust relations, the next step is to re ne
the pro tability analysis by taking trust into account. To do that, in [
In [
Discussion
In this subsection we brie y analyze the presented trust ontology (Figure 3) with
those nine trust decision input factors enumerated by Viljanen [
In this paper we discussed about the trust relation between business actors in a business collaboration and we proposed a lightweight ontology with the minimal set of concepts for trust in business collaborations. Here we presented the trust ontology in conjunction with e3value business ontology however despite their di erences the three main business ontologies (REA, e3value, and BMO) share the core concept of value exchange between two business actors and therefore the trust concept can be added to the other two ontologies analogously.