Enabling Trust-Aware Semantic Web Service Selection – A Flexible and Personalized Approach

In today’s online markets, consumers need support in finding providers that offer the products or services they need and that are trustworthy. While Semantic Web Services (SWS) research addresses the first problem (discovering functionally suitable service providers), it neglects the second. Hence, several attempts have been made to complement service retrieval techniques based on semantic matchmaking with trust-establishing techniques that leverage collaborative consumer feedback. However, the diversity and multi-faceted nature of SWS impose special requirements on the underlying feedback mechanism, in particular w.r.t. their flexibility and expressiveness. Existing approaches only partially meet those requirements. In this paper, we will therefore propose a trust-establishing mechanism for Semantic Web Services that allows to asses a service provider’s trustworthiness with respect to various service aspects and is flexible enough to adjust to various kinds of services and consumer requirements.