Abstract
Trust is a crucial component of social life. Given its ubiqui- tous presence, the notion of trust appears in many contexts and has been defined in a wide number of ways throughout the years across several ar- eas. Although much progress has been made to clarify the ontological nature of trust, the term remains overloaded and there is not yet a pre- vailing and conceptually clear notion of trust. In this paper we address this issue by means of an in-depth ontological analysis of the notion of trust, grounded in the Unified Foundational Ontology. As a result, we propose a concrete artifact, namely, the Reference Ontology of Trust, which we employ to harmonize different conceptions from the literature.