Trust bootstrapping services and service providers

Trust is an important factor for successful online communication. Trust has been used as a criterion for service selection. Most trust and reputation studies assume a system where trust and reputations already exist. However, it is important to initialize trust rates for new services, which have no rating history, the so-called trust bootstrapping process. Trust bootstrapping assists the requestors in their service selection decision. Trust bootstrapping is the initial step in trust building process. Trust bootstrapping is important for reliable interaction with services and service providers that are new to the system. This paper proposes an approach for trust bootstrapping services and service providers. The proposed solution follows the trust principles and addresses a number of trust challenges in the literature. Experiment study is conducted and the results are analysed.