A Community-Based Approach for Selecting Service Providers

摘要

The current infrastructure for Web services supports service discovery based on a common repository. A prospective service user can query a repository via a simple search interface. The repository produces a list of service providers matching the given description along with typical interfaces to talk to them. The more extensive the repository the longer the list of providers it would produce. However, the service user must select one provider. Current approaches provide no support for evaluating providers or selecting from among the known providers. This paper develops a community-based approach for evaluating service providers. Agents cooperate with each other to evaluate different providers. Importantly, the agents rate each other, and autonomously decide how much to weigh each other's recommendations. The underlying algorithm with which the agents reason is developed in the context of a concept lattice, which supports a mechanism to find and rate the relevant agents. The approach is evaluated in comparison with two traditional recommender approaches.