An Ontology for Standardising Trustworthy AI

Worldwide, there are a multiplicity of parallel activities being undertaken in developing international standards, regulations and individual organisational policies related to AI and its trustworthiness characteristics. The current lack of mappings between these activities presents the danger of a highly fragmented global landscape emerging in AI trustworthiness. This could present society, government and industry with competing standards, regulations and organisational practices that will then serve to undermine rather than build trust in AI. This chapter presents a simple ontology that can be used for checking the consistency and overlap of concepts from different standards, regulations and policies. The concepts in this ontology are grounded in an overview of AI standardisation currently being undertaken in ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 42 and identifies its project to define an AI management system standard (AIMS or ISO/IEC WD 42001) as the starting point for establishing conceptual mapping between different initiatives. We propose a minimal, high level ontology for the support of conceptual mapping between different documents and show in the first instance how this can help map out the overlaps and gaps between and among SC 42 standards currently under development.