Two-dimensional trust rating aggregations in service-oriented applications

In most existing trust evaluation studies, a single value is computed based on the ratings given to a service provider to indicate the current trust level. This is useful but may not represent the trust features well under certain circumstances. Alternatively, a complete set of trust ratings can be transferred to a service client for local trust calculation. But this obviously creates a big overhead in communication as the data set usually has a large size covering a long service history. In this paper, we present a novel two-dimensional aggregation approach consisting of both vertical and horizontal aggregations of trust ratings. The vertical aggregation calculates the aggregated rating representing the trust level for the services delivered in a small time period. The horizontal aggregation applies our proposed optimal algorithm to determine the minimal number of time intervals, within each of which a trust vector with three values can be calculated to represent all the ratings in that time interval and retain the trust features well. Hence, a small set of trust vectors can represent a large set of trust ratings. This is significant for large-scale trust rating transmission and trust evaluation. Experiments have been conducted to illustrate the properties of our proposed approach.