A socially inspired reputation model

Abstract

In recent years we have observed a huge evolution of services deployed over the Internet, in particular by the World Wide Web; the development of Web Services has enabled Business-to-Business (B2B) relationships, i.e., the exchange of services over the Internet between different, possibly mutually distrustful, organisations. Unfortunately, Web Services themselves do not provide all the features that are needed to implement and enforce B2B relationships; organisations have to be provided with security and trust guarantees so as to trust their services to be safely provided over the Internet. In this paper we refine the trust foundations of [16] then we extend it with a model and metric of reputation inspired by the phenomenon of reputation in human societies so as to enable service consumers and producers to be mutually aware of their trustworthiness. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2004.