User-Controlled Collaborations in the Context of Trust Extended Environments

The area of virtual organisations researches mechanisms to enable entities from different organisations to collectively create a virtual enterprise for some mutual benefit. Our research is particularly interested in the type of collaboration where resources are normally 'opaque' and are only revealed 'as- required' between a select group of collaborating partners. Working in this area has revealed a need to establish a trusted environment for all application transactions prior-to, during and after a collaboration e.g. a pre-active eContract negotiation phase, an active phase for all collaborating activities and a post- active phase for information retrieval. Central to our embodiment of the trusted environment is the development and use of a portable trust extension device (TED) with applicability to each phase of the collaboration process.