A User-Oriented Trust Model for Web Services

Trust is one of the most critical quality factors for service requestors when they select the services from a large pool of Web services. However, existing web service trust models either do not focus on satisfying user's preferences for different quality of service (QoS) attributes, or do not pay enough attention to the impact of malicious ratings on trust evaluation. To address these gaps, a user-oriented trust model considering user's preferences and false ratings is proposed in this paper. The model introduces an approach to automatically mine user's preferences from their requirements, the preferences are used to determine the weights of each QoS attribute when integrating local trust into the multi-dimensional QoS attributes. The local trust on a service for the user is derived by combining the trust on QoS attributes and the trust on user's ratings. In this model, the users are classified into different groups according to their preferences, the honesty of each group is assessed by filtering out dishonest users using a hybrid approach which combines rating consistency clustering and an average method. To calculate the global trustworthiness of a service for the users group, the weight of ratings is dynamically adjusted according to the results of honesty assessment. The simulation results indicate that the model works well on personalized evaluation of trust, and it can effectively dilute the influence of malicious ratings.