A Trust Measurement Mechanism for Service Agents

Trust is central to interactions in Web systems in which service consumers select the trustworthy service agents to provide the expected services. Currently, the analysis of the essential meaning of trust has not been paid enough attention as well as the reasoning process on trustworthiness. This paper proposes an ontology-based trust model which can offer more insightful understanding to the trust relationships among service agents in Web systems. A trust ontology with a set of trust computational rules have been given for supporting trust analysis and reasoning. Also the structure of the service-oriented agents has been given. Finally a case study is used to illustrate how the service agents collaborate with each others to determine the trustworthiness of their partners.