Majority-Rule-Based Web Service Selection

Abstract

In many Web service selection scenarios, the responsibility to decide which is the appropriate service is shared among multiple parties, e.g., among the department heads of a university. The standard approach is to discard services which are unanimously inappropriate, and return the rest. However, as the involved parties may have conflicting interests, it is possible that only few services are eliminated, and thus almost all discovered services need to be considered. This work addresses this shortcoming, by enforcing the majority rule: a service is discarded if the majority of the parties find it inappropriate. We formulate the majority-rule-based service selection problem based on the notions of dominance and skyline. Furthermore, we propose an algorithm that returns a more manageable set of services, eliminating many inappropriate ones, and is more efficient that standard skyline techniques.