Trust-Aware Service Recommendation via Exploiting Social Networks

With the rapid growth in the number of available services, recommending suitable services to users becomes increasingly important. A number of collaborative service recommendation methods based on user experiences have been proposed for this purpose. Most of them adopt the similarity-based Collaborative Filtering (CF) technique, which tends to identify similar users for a target user and recommends to the target user the services preferred by the similar users. However, a user similar to the target user is unnecessarily trustworthy to him/her. Therefore, the results recommended by similarity-based CF are probably unreliable. Moreover, existing service recommendation methods seldom incorporate social trust relationships among service users into service recommendation. In this paper, we propose a collaborative, trust-aware service recommendation method for service-oriented environments with social networks. The method is based on an integration of the user-service relation and the user-user social relation. Experimental results demonstrate that our service recommendation method significantly outperforms conventional similarity-based recommendation and trust-based service recommendation methods.