A Comprehensive and Unified Approach to Web Service Trust Evaluation Based on Uncertainty Methodology

Abstract

Web services have the advantage of being able to generate new value-added services based on existing services. To effectively compose Web services, the composition process necessitates that the services that will participate in a given composite service are more trustworthy than those that provide similar functionality. The trust mechanism appears to be a promising way for determining service selection and composition. Existing trust evaluation approaches do not take into account customer expectations. Based on fuzzy set theory and probability theory, this work proposes a unique Web service trust evaluation approach that is notable for its ability to provide personalized service selection based on customer expectations and preferences. The proposed approach defines trust as a fuzzy notion that is related to prior experiences and ratings, and expresses trust in two different forms. This work mainly solves two key issues in Web service trust architectures, bootstrapping trust for the newcomer services and deriving trust for composite services. The proposed approach combines the solutions to numerous issues in a natural way. The case study and approaches comparison demonstrate that the proposed approach is feasible.

Keywords

• service composition
• service selection
• trust bootstrap
• trust derivation
• uncertainty
• web services