A Community-Based Rating System for Selecting Among Web Services

Abstract

The current infrastructure for Web services has a static approach to discover a service. It is based on a common repository that has a simple search interface that lets the user query and find a provider for the desired service. More often than not, the repository produces a long list of service providers along with typical interfaces to talk to them. There is no support to evaluate service providers. Such evaluations are important to make a selection among competing service providers. This thesis develops a community-based approach for evaluating service providers. In this approach, agents cooperate with each other to evaluate different providers. Importantly, the agents rate each other, to decide how to weigh each other's recommendations. The reasoning of each agent is enabled by a concept lattice, which supports a mechanism to rate the agents.