A formal approach for matching and ranking trustworthy context-dependent services

Abstract

Service Oriented Computing (SOC) is being utilized and relied on by the enterprise application development and distributed computing. The three fundamental interacting components in SOC are service providers, service requesters, and registries. One of the challenges that face the requester when choosing a service is to find the trustworthy service which satisfies and serves the requester and provider contexts. This is due to the increasing number of services in registries. Thus, there is a need for a ranking approach which takes into account both the rich features and the context of service requester and provider, in order to improve the applicability of a top-ranking result. By including the trustworthiness requirements in the ranking process for the purpose of providing a reliable service with respect to the requester’s preferences, we put forward a generic structure and framework for matching and ranking trustworthy context-dependent services. We based our framework on the logic and set theory, and defined a formal description of the mentioned services. Consequently, we assessed our suggested architecture using a real-world case study. The study presents the effectiveness of the suggested ranking model architecture for finding the most suitable trustworthy service according to user preferences while considering the context information. The proposed framework can be utilized in several application domains.