Propositional Logic-Based and Evidence-Rich Trustworthiness Evaluation for Web Services

With more and more Web services available on the Internet, users reuse these services in their own applications. Because Web services are delivered by third parties and hosted on remote servers, it becomes a big problem to determine the trustworthiness of the Web services. Many Web services trustworthiness evaluation approaches have been proposed, however, the trustworthy evidences used in these approaches are limited and the methods proposed lack customizability and extensibility, which makes them difficult to apply. In this paper, we propose a lightweight Propositional Logic-based Web services trustworthiness evaluation method, which is customizable, extensible, and easy to apply in reality. First we collect comprehensive trustworthy evidences including both objective trustworthy evidences (e.g. QoS) and subjective evidences (e.g. reputation) from the Internet. Then we propose a Propositional Logic-based Web services trustworthiness evaluation model, which is customizable and extensible, to capture users' trustworthiness requirements. Finally, the trustworthiness of all Web services are evaluated and returned to the users via a Web services search engine. To validate the effectiveness of our approach, two experiments are conducted on a large-scale real-world dataset. The experimental results show that our method is easy to use and can effectively evaluate Web services trustworthiness, which helps users to reuse Web services.