Trust-based web service selection in virtual communities

Abstract

In the present web service architecture, selecting which web service to use is still a task which requires a high level of human intervention. In this paper, we propose a trust-based web service selection process which aspires to automate part of the web service selection task to decrease the workload of human designers in the process. Most of the existing web service selection mechanisms are capability oriented or function oriented. We propose a trust-based web service selection approach to augment the current web service mechanisms. A trust model from our previous research, which offers strong protection against the adverse effect of unfair ratings from witnesses, is incorporated into an agent augmented service oriented virtual community. An experiment based on the virtual community system is conducted to study the effectiveness of the model in enabling trust agents to select highly trustworthy web services with minimal human supervision.