Trust statement

A trust statement is the explicit expression of a perceived trust level. It is made by the truster and represents the subjective judgment of the trustee's trustworthiness, according to the truster's point of view.

For example, on Advogato, user A can certify user B as "Master". We can say that user A has issued a trust statement about user B whose value is "Master", representing the fact "I, user A, explicitly express that I trust user B at "Master" level".

It is usually represented as an arrow going from the truster to the trustee, possibly with a weight over it representing the intensity of trust.

Aggregating the trust statements expressed by all the users of the community it is possible to create the overall trust network and then, possibly, to run a trust metric on it.