Association-based dynamic computation of reputation in web services

Web services are usually selected and composed based on their reputation. In general, the reputation of a web service is computed using the feedback provided by the user. However, the users' feedback bears many problems, including a low incentive for providing ratings and a bias towards positive or negative ratings. In this paper, we propose a method that overcomes the dependency on users' feedback for computing the reputation of web services. The proposed method dynamically computes the reputation of a web service based on its association with other web services. The association coefficient between any two web services is computed by utilising the statistics of how often they have been composed together. This factor is considered in our method to show the evolution of reputation over a period of time. The experimental results demonstrate the utility of the proposed method.