On Time, Conflict, Weighting and Dependency Aspects of Assessing the Trustworthiness of Digital Records

In the area of digital records management, the reliability of a digital record’s operator varies over time, and consequently affects the trustworthiness of the record. The quality of the reliability of the operator is a measure of the quality of the record’s evidential value that is, in turn, a measure of the record’s trustworthiness. In assessing the trustworthiness of a record using evidential value, it is essential to combine evidence from various sources, which may be conflicting and/or interdependent. In this paper we describe our research on these problems, and develop a trustworthiness assessment model which addresses these problems and integrates a beta reputation system in combination with a forgetting factor to assess the temporal aspects of the evidential value of an operator, a weighting mechanism to detect and avoid conflicts, and a weighted sum mechanism to combine dependent evidence. Our results show that the integrated model can improve the objective assessment of the trustworthiness of digital records over time using evidential value as a measure of trustworthiness.