Trust management for service-oriented environments

Service Computing holds the promise of transitioning the field of IT to levels of efficiencies and globalization never reached before. The ideal space of operation is without any doubt the Web, where data, documents, and tools/applications are expected to be uniformly represented and managed through the prism of services. The objective is to be able to leverage the vast array of data and applications in the most cost effective way while providing more opportunities for leveraging previous investments. The standardization efforts have played a key role leading to the early adoption of services as the paradigm of choice for IT investments. However, much remains to be done in terms of providing a robust and efficient infrastruc- ture to manage the whole life-cycle of services. Unfortunately, this is mainly due to ¿over-standardization¿ efforts. The last few years have seen too many standards, in many cases competing; springing up from various standards bodies to deal with specific and sometimes narrow requirements of service management, organization, and use. This unfortunate situation has created confusion in the targeted markets and stifled innovation in what could be considered as a potentially revolutionizing field. Additionally, this state of affairs had the effect of hampering the wide and speedy deployment of service-oriented solutions.