Towards an Ontology of Trust for Situational Understanding

In this paper we propose a computational methodology for assessing the impact of trust associated to sources of information in situational understanding activities—i.e. relating relevant information and form logical conclusions, as well as identifying gaps in information in order to answer a given query. Often trust in the source of information serves as a proxy for evaluating the quality of the information itself, especially in the cases of information overhead. We show how our computational methodology support human analysts in situational understanding by drawing conclusions from defaults, as well as highlighting issues that demand further investigation.