A Trust Vector Approach to Service-Oriented Applications

Trust is a critical issue in e-commerce and e-service environments. In some applications (such as eBay), the trust management mechanisms have been introduced to provide valuable information to buyers prior to placing orders and making payments. Meanwhile, the trust issue is also actively studied in the research community. However, most studies and applications focus on approaches that result in a single trust value to represent the trust level of sellers or service providers. Such a simple trust evaluation method may not be able to depict the trust history exactly and may leave misleading information to service customers. In this paper, we present a novel approach of trust vector consisting of three values to reflect the trust level with more indications.