Workshop Description

A suitable security infrastructure is crucial for commercial and mission critical applications in distributed environments. Without the means for specifying and enforcing policies and access control constraints, distributed resources and services are not protected against misuse in an open environment. Additionally, as distributed data on the Semantic Web is authenticated and aggregated for applications, the need to determine the trustworthiness of statements and those who made them becomes important. These two aspects of trust - security and reputation - will come together to form the foundation for the Web of Trust as the Semantic Web advances.

Recent research has begun to explore these issues in more depth, and first promising approaches for trust, trust management, and trust negotiation have started to emerge which use semantic web technologies and enable widespread distribution of resources and cooperation of autonomous agentson the Web in a secure way. Ontologies, rule languages, semantic web reasoning, and public key infrastructures are important ingredients of this infrastructure to enable distributed peers to negotiate access to distributed resources and services. Trust management and propagation allows users and distributed agents to establish trust in a dynamic network of autonomous peers.

This workshop will bring together researchers from different communities to examine cutting-edge approaches towards the establishment of these security, trust, and reputation infrastructures. The emphasis will be to advance and integrate security and trust related research from the semantic web, logical reasoning, grid, agent, peer-to-peer, and web services.

The workshop will include both presentations of research papers and demonstrations of implemented systems. We envisage a wide variety of contributions both from the area of traditional security and access control research as well as from the area of reputation propagation and social network theory. We will therefore have a panel discussion specifically on the issue of integrating security and digital signature infrastructures with trust and reputation propagation mechanisms, as well as allocate ample time for general discussion.