Trust Management Support for Context-Aware Service Platforms

Abstract

High quality context information retrieved from trustworthy context providers allows a more reliable context-aware service adaption but also implies a higher risk for the service users in case of privacy violations. In this chapter we present a trust management model that support users and providers of context-aware services in managing the trade-off between privacy protection and context-based service adaptation. We applied our trust management model in two trust-based selection mechanisms. The first trust-based selection mechanism support users of context-aware services in selecting trustworthy service providers to interact with. This mechanism supports the users in the selection process, taking into account the users’ goals, trust beliefs, and the trust dependencies between the service users and the entities that collaborate in the context-aware service provisioning. The second trust-based selection mechanism supports context-aware service providers in selecting trustworthy context providers taking into account the trustworthiness of the context providers to provide context information about a specific user and quality level. To conclude this chapter we present the evaluation of the technical feasibility of our trustmanagement model in trust-based selection mechanisms through a prototype implementation.