Selecting Web services based on past user experiences

Since the Internet of Services (IoS) is becoming reality, there is an inherent need for novel service selection mechanisms, which work in spite of large numbers of alternative services and take the user-centric nature of services in the IoS into account. One way to do this is to incorporate feedback from previous service users. However, practical issues such as trust aspects, interaction contexts or synonymous feedbacks have to be taken into account. In this paper we discuss a service selection mechanism which makes use of structured and unstructured feedback to capture the Quality of Experience that services have provided in the past. We have implemented our approach within the SOA runtime VRESCO, where we use freeform tags for unstructured and numerical ratings for structured user feedback. We discuss the general process of feedback-based service selection, and explain how the problems described above can be tackled. We conclude the paper with an illustrative case study and discussion of the presented ideas.