Trust Indicator Modeling for a Reputation Service in Virtual Organizations

In today's Internet economy, new business models emerge to respond to business opportunities that one organization alone can not exploit. Virtual organizations (VOs) are a prominent example for such models currently investigated in, e.g., collaborative engineering and aggregated services provisioning. The partner selection process is a problem that needs to be swiftly performed for a VO to become operational. In the global Internet community, previously unknown partners have to be considered for important business transactions, taking a risk in expecting partners to behave reliably. A reputation service can help to reduce this risk by supporting the (automated) decision process of system integrators inquiring about potential partner organizations. This paper presents a service-based reputation system rooting trust in an organization’s inherent observable properties, called trust indicators. A taxonomy to classify trust indicators according to their semantic meaning is proposed. Furthermore, a stochastic trust indicator model based on distribution functions is presented, taking updates and trust indicator aggregation towards an overall reputation using Bayes theory into account as well.