Modeling and mining of dynamic trust in complex service-oriented systems

The global scale and distribution of companies have changed the economy and dynamics of businesses. Web-based collaborations and cross-organizational processes typically require dynamic and context-based interactions between people and services. However, finding the right partner to work on joint tasks or to solve emerging problems in such scenarios is challenging due to scale and temporary nature of collaborations. Furthermore, actor competencies evolve over time, thus requiring dynamic approaches for their management. Web services and SOA are the ideal technical framework to automate interactions spanning people and services. To support such complex interaction scenarios, we discuss mixed service-oriented systems that are composed of both humans and software services, interacting to perform certain activities. As an example, consider a professional online support community consisting of interactions between human participants and software-based services. We argue that trust between members is essential for successful collaborations. Unlike a security perspective, we focus on the notion of social trust in collaborative networks. We show an interpretative rule-based approach to enable humans and services to establish trust based on interactions and experiences, considering their context and subjective perceptions.