Trust has stood out more than ever in the light of recent innovations. Some examples are advances in artificial intelligence that make machines more and more humanlike, and the introduction of decentralized technologies (e.g. blockchains), which creates new forms of (decentralized) trust. These new developments have the potential to improve the provision of products and services, as well as to contribute to individual and collective well-being. However, their adoption depends largely on trust. In order to build trustworthy systems, along with defining laws, regulations and proper governance models for new forms of trust, it is necessary to properly conceptualize trust, so that it can be understood both by humans and machines. This paper is the culmination of a long-term research program of providing a solid ontological foundation on trust, by creating reference conceptual models to support information modeling, automated reasoning, information integration and semantic interoperability tasks. To address this, a Reference Ontology of Trust (ONTrust) was developed, grounded on the Unified Foundational Ontology and specified in OntoUML, which has been applied in several initiatives, to demonstrate, for example, how it can be used for conceptual modeling and enterprise architecture design, for language evaluation and (re)design, for trust management, for requirements engineering, and for trustworthy artificial intelligence (AI) in the context of affective Human-AI teaming. ONTrust formally characterizes the concept of trust and its different types, describes the different factors that can influence trust, as well as explains how risk emerges from trust relations. To illustrate the working of ONTrust, the ontology is applied to model two case studies extracted from the literature.

翻译：在近期创新的背景下，信任的重要性比以往任何时候都更加凸显。例如，人工智能的进步使机器越来越类人，以及去中心化技术（如区块链）的引入，创造了（去中心化的）信任新形式。这些新发展有潜力改进产品与服务的提供，并促进个人与集体的福祉。然而，它们的采用在很大程度上取决于信任。为了构建可信赖的系统，除了为新的信任形式定义法律、法规和适当的治理模型外，还必须对信任进行恰当的概念化，使其能够被人类和机器共同理解。本文是一项长期研究计划的结晶，旨在通过创建参考概念模型来支持信息建模、自动推理、信息集成和语义互操作性任务，从而为信任奠定坚实的本体论基础。为此，我们基于统一基础本体论开发了信任参考本体论（ONTrust），并使用OntoUML进行形式化规范。该本体已在多项倡议中得到应用，例如用于展示其如何支持概念建模与企业架构设计、语言评估与（再）设计、信任管理、需求工程，以及在情感化人机协作背景下实现可信人工智能（AI）。ONTrust形式化地刻画了信任概念及其不同类型，描述了可能影响信任的各种因素，并解释了信任关系如何引发风险。为说明ONTrust的工作机制，本文应用该本体对从文献中提取的两个案例研究进行了建模。