Service trust management for e-government applications

Many services and service providers compete with each other to provide similar services in the service-orientedWeb (also known as ServiceWeb). Selection of the best services or service providers is an important and challenging problem. Trust plays an important role in identifying the best service provider for a customer, where trust information is computed from customer feedback ratings for the services. Such rating provides ameasure of previous consumers' satisfactionwith the services. The satisfaction value indicates the trustworthiness of a service provider in delivering the services as promised (also known as service trust). This situation exists in many E-Government applications where a large number of services are outsourced to the third party service providers and there is a need to select the best services for customers based on their current needs. In this chapter, we propose a community based approach of managing service trust for E-Government applications with the focus on a human services delivery system. We describe the architecture, implementation and a case study of the proposed service trust management framework in the context of delivering human services.