A User-Oriented Approach to Assessing Web Service Trustworthiness

Trustworthiness is a synthetic characteristic of Web services, which not only involves objective attributes of software quality, but also subjective perception of users. However accurate assessment for service trustworthiness from user's perception is a difficult problem, since user perception of a particular Web service varies in terms of users, application scenarios and time. In this paper, we present a user oriented Web service trustworthiness assessment approach based on collecting and aggregating user feedbacks. The difference from other research work is that in our approach we consider application and user specific factors including the similarity between contexts of the evaluator and feedback reporter, the timeliness of feedback and the evaluator's preferences on quality properties of a Web service. A prototype of our approach is implemented based on ServiceXchange, a Web service repository and search engine developed by our research team. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach has a significant advantage over other approaches that treat feedbacks equally and ignore the difference among user preferences.