European and Mediterranean Conference on Information Systems
Abstract
Generating Citizen Trust in e-Government using a Trust Verification AgentThis is an eGISE network paper. It is motivated by a concern about the extent to which trust issues inhibit a citizen’s take-up of online public sector services or engagement with public decision and
policy making. A citizen’s decision to use online systems is influenced by their willingness to trust the environment and agency involved. This project addresses one aspect of individual “trust” decisions by
providing support for citizens trying to evaluate the implications of the security infrastructure provided by the agency. Based on studies of the way both groups (citizens and agencies) express their concerns and concepts in the security area, the project will develop a software tool – a trust
verification agent (TVA) - that can take an agency’s security statements (or security audit) and infer how effectively this meets the security concerns of a particular citizen. This will enable citizens to state
their concerns and obtain an evaluation of the agency’s provision in appropriate “citizen friendly” language. Further, by employing rule-based expert systems techniques the TVA will also be able to explain its evaluation.Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, UK (grant GR/T27020/01
