ORDAIN: An ontology for trust management in the Internet of Things

K. Kravari, N. Bassiliades, “ORDAIN: An ontology for trust management in the Internet of Things”, Proc. 16th International Conference on Ontologies, DataBases, and Applications of Semantics (ODBASE 2017), Rhodes, Greece, Oct 24-25, 2017, OTM 2017 Conferences, LNCS, Vol. 10574, Springer, pp. 216-223

The Internet of Things is coming and it has the potential to change our daily life. Yet, such a large scaled environment needs a semantic background to achieve interoperability and knowledge diffusion. Furthermore, this open, distributed and heterogeneous environment raises important challenges, such as trustworthiness among the various types of devices and participants. Developing and sharing ontologies that support trust management models and applications would be an effective step in achieving semantic interoperability on a large scale. Currently, most of the ontologies and semantic description frameworks in the Internet of Things are either context-based or at an early stage. This paper reports on identifying and incorporating social and non-social parameters involved in the Internet of Things in a general-purpose ontology that will support trust management. This ontology will include among others data and semantics about trust principles, involved parties, characteristics of entities, rating parameters, rule-based mechanisms, confidence and dishonesty in the environment. Defining an ontology and using semantic descriptions for data related to trustworthiness issues will provide an important instrument in developing distributed trust (reputation) models.