  In any given collaboration, information needs to flow from one participant to
another. While participants may be interested in sharing information with one
another, it is often necessary for them to establish the impact of sharing
certain kinds of information. This is because certain information could have
detrimental effects when it ends up in wrong hands. For this reason, any
would-be participant in a collaboration may need to establish the guarantees
that the collaboration provides, in terms of protecting sensitive information,
before joining the collaboration as well as evaluating the impact of sharing a
given piece of information with a given set of entities. The concept of a trust
domains aims at managing trust-related issues in information sharing. It is
essential for enabling efficient collaborations. Therefore, this research
attempts to develop a taxonomy for trust domains with measurable trust
characteristics, which provides security-enhanced, distributed containers for
the next generation of composite electronic services for supporting
collaboration and data exchange within and across multiple organisations. Then
the developed taxonomy is applied to possible scenarios (e.g. Health Care
Service Scenario and ConfiChair Scenario), in which the concept of trust
domains could be useful.
