Expectations Enhanced Trust Model

With the emergence of the web of services and the semantic web, the need to find different methods of web service selection is gaining importance. Many efforts are focusing on the aspects of building the trust networks on the semantic web as well as agent-based models to utilize the trust in selecting the appropriate web service from a group of available services.The main direction of the research is to provide a model by which trust can be computed for several service providers that are available to accomplish the same task. In this work, we explore the concept of ’User Expectations’. The trust is based on the rating assigned by the user. The rating is based on user satisfaction, which is based on the fulfilment of the user expectations. Without taking into consideration the original user expectations, the assigned ratings are not objective, but rather subjective. Thus, we propose a semantic web based model for capturing the user expectations to enhance the trust rating based on the requesting user’s own expectations. We evaluate our approach via simulations on a simplified but realistic service instances and past and current consumers each with their own expectations. Our results show that using these considerations for user expectations, service agents are able to determine over time the best service selection for a consumer.