Trust-based Personal Information Management in SOA

A service oriented architecture (SOA) enables cooperation in an open and highly concurrent context. In this paper, we investigate the management of personal information by an SOA service consumer while invoking composed services. Generally speaking, managing personal information relates to different aspects of data management (mainly storage, persistence and querying). In this work, we focus on privacy and confidentiality in a business to user (b2u) application and on critical information dissemination in business to business (b2b) solutions. For these applications, we study the balance between quality of service (that works better when provided with our personal data) and the consumer's data access policy. We present a service architecture that is based on an open multi-agent system where agents provide and invoke (composed) services in order to achieve their goals. We describe a logic-based trust module that a service consumer can use to assess his trust toward composed services (which are perceived as composed actions executed by a group of agents in the system). Our trust module, using an abduction mechanism, provides the service consumer with a synthesized view of his beliefs about the current state of the multi-agent system. This view is coupled with an answer to the question: why should I trust or not this composition? We then illustrate our solution in a case study involving a professional social network (like linkedin, viadeo, etc.). We discusses how the CEO of a start-up company collects information about a potential recruit, while preserving his personal information (because he might have to provide some when collecting information), using composed services provided by the members of the network including the recruit herself.