A fuzzy model for reasoning about reputation in web services

Abstract

Reputation systems are typically based on ratings given by the users. When there are no mechanisms in place to detect collusion and deception, combining user testimonies as such to form a provider's reputation may not give an accurate assessment, especially if the context of the ratings is not known. Moreover, such systems are vulnerable to manipulations by malicious users. Hence it becomes essential to establish the validity of the ratings prior to using them in formulating reputation based on such ratings. It is important to identify the rationale behind the ratings so that similar ratings (or ratings pertaining to a context) can be aggregated to obtain a reputation value meaningful in that context. We propose a fuzzy approach to analyze user rating behavior to infer the rationale for ratings in a web services environment. This inference of rationale facilitates the system to validate ratings, detect deception and collusion, identify user preferences and provide recommendations to users.

Trustworthy interaction balancing in mixed service-oriented systems

“…Fuzzy set theory, developed by Zadeh [22], and fuzzy logic emerged in the domain of control engineering, but are nowadays increasingly used in computer science to enable lightweight reasoning on a set of imperfect data or knowledge. The concept of fuzziness has been used earlier in trust models [6,13,17], however, to our best knowledge not to enable an interpretation of trust from larger and diverse sets of metrics, calculated upon observed interactions. Due to space limitations we do not outline fuzzy set theory here, but refer to further literature, for instance [23].…”

“…Fuzzy set theory has been applied in trust models before [6,13,17], however, to our best knowledge, not to interpret diverse sets of interaction metrics. Utilizing interaction metrics, in particular calculated between pairs of network members, enables us to incorporate a personalized and social perspective.…”

On the reputation of communities of web services

“…La réputation des services Web est un domaine de recherche très actif [7,11,17,20,21]. En raison du nombre croissant des communautés offertes en ligne, la compétition est devenue significative.…”

Implicit Culture Framework for Behavior Transfer

“…To support such information exchange, the idea of applying recommendation systems for discovering and selecting web services has been recently proposed (Bova et al, 2007;Kerrigan, 2006;Manikrao & Prabhakar, 2005;Sherchan et al, 2006).…”

“…Existing recommendation-based approaches use ratings of service providers based on explicit and often subjective opinions of service clients (Sherchan et al, 2006). However, as demonstrated in (Claypool et al, 2001), people are not usually willing to actively provide feedback.…”