Effective Web Service Selection via Communities Formed by Super-Agents

In this paper, we propose a novel community-based approach for web service selection where super-agents with more capabilities serve as community managers. They maintain communities and build community-based reputation for a service based on the opinions from all community members that have similar interests and judgement criteria. The community-based reputation is useful for consumer agents in selecting satisfactory services when they do not have much personal experience with the services. Experimental results show that our approach results in more effective service selection. A practical reward mechanism is also introduced to create incentives for super-agents to contribute their resources and provide truthful community-based reputation information, as strong support for our approach.