A distributed decision making and propagation approach for trust-based service discovery in social networks

Abstract

With the emergence of social networks, users show the willingness to use them to find and offer services. A problem arises when the number of available services is increasing and no means to distinguish between two or many providers offering the same service. To overcome this issue, we propose a trust measure defined as the combination of two dimensions namely sociability and expertise. This measure allows to discover trustworthy providers with good services satisfying the requester's needs. The problem increases when no central control can be fixed due to the distributed nature of social networks. To address that, our work advocates a distributed agent-based service discovery approach where each user is represented by an agent that acts on behalf of him to achieve the service discovery task. The propagation process within the social network is ensured by means of a referral system wherein agents communicate and evaluate referrals based on a distributed knowledge and a decentralized decision-making. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014.