The best way to design your own trust component will vary greatly depending on what sort of domain you are designing it for and what the reasons are that you wish to move away from the trust component already provided with OpenKnowledge. We therefore cannot give you much direction in this: you must consider what trust means in the domain in which you are interested.

However, any trust model must consider two questions:
- how do we determine how trustworthy another peer is?
- how do we use this information?

In the existing OpenKnowledge trust component, the former question is answered through looking at previous interactions and making judgements on the basic of past performance. However, for some domains this may be much less automated: for example, a peer may be trusted if it represents a known source of information that is trusted within the community. In this situation, users may be unwilling to depend on automatically generated trust scores and prefer to go with community norms. In other situations, more simple evaluation techniques such as page rank may be appropriate. In order to use a trust component, you must have some way of extracting this knowledge and providing it to peers who must choose who to interact with.

The answer to the latter question is that information must be used during the pre-interaction phase (this page describes this) when determining which other peers to interact with. This is how any trust component links in to the OpenKnoweldge system: it is used to form part of the decision to reject or accept potential players in an interaction. For some domains, this could be as simple as providing the peers with a list of other peers that they can interact with: any other peer will be refused. In other domains, this would be a more complicated, situational calculation.

Therefore, what is required of any trust model is:
- to provide a mechanism for evaluating trust (which may be fully manual, fully automated or interactive) and to provide this information to one's own peer, or allow this information to be shared as appropriate;
- to provide a mechanism for peers to use this information appropriately when determining who they are prepared to interact with.