Trust Assessment for Web Services under Uncertainty

We introduce a model for assessing the trust of providers in a service-oriented environment. Our model is cooperative in nature, such that Web services share their experiences of the service providers with their peers through ratings. The different ratings are aggregated using the "statistical cloud model" defined for uncertain situations. The model can uniformly describe the concepts of randomness, fuzziness, and their relationship in quantitative terms. By incorporating the credibility values of service raters in the model, we can assess a service provider's trust. Experiment results show that our proposed model performs in a fairly accurate manner.