Bootstrapping Trust and Reputation for Web Services

Trust and reputation of web services is usually established based on the historical information about past transactions or rating scores collected over a period of time. However, when a new web service joins a community, normally there is not much information to be relied on to evaluate its initial reputation. Therefore trust bootstrapping, the technique to establish trust for a web service based on very limited information becomes a real challenge that most of the current models of web service trust neglect. In this paper, we present a comprehensive approach with various techniques to tackle this problem. In particular, we propose inheritance mechanism, referral mechanism, and guarantee mechanism for bootstrapping the trust and reputation of a new web service according to its associated characteristics. Moreover, the existing trust and reputation models can be effectively leveraged with the support of the proposed bootstrapping mechanisms. Detailed experimental results are provided to evaluate the approach.