Toward a Unified Framework for Web Service Trustworthiness

The intrinsic openness of the Service-Oriented Computing vision makes crucial to locate useful services and recognize them as trustworthy. What does it mean that a Web service is trustworthy? How can a software agent evaluate the trustworthiness of a Web service? In this paper we present an ongoing research aiming at providing an answer to these key issues to realize this vision.

In particular, starting from an analysis of the weaknesses of current approaches, we discuss the possibility of a unified framework for Web service trustworthiness. The founding principle of our novel framework is that “hard trust” and “soft trust” provisioning techniques should be embodied in a unified hybrid model.