Reputation system for web services

In a computing environment for providing web services which provide computing services to clients via protocols and cross-platform standards, a method for finding and ranking web services in a manner that matches web services with a consumer's computing service needs, and which is not significantly influenced by popularity data or other manipulable data of a web service, the method comprising:

• receiving a query for web service data, the query including request data comprising at least one basic operating requirement and at least one reputation requirement that corresponds to at least one schematized behavioral attribute for a web service, the at least one schematized behavioral attribute of the reputation data including at least one technical attribute unrelated to web service popularity and which are resistant to manipulation and which relates to empirical data on a web service's responsiveness, wherein web service responsiveness is a measure of how often a web service reads from a specific port;
• using the request data, including the technical attribute including the web service's responsiveness data, and excluding attributes, including popularity data, that are susceptible to manipulation by a provider of a web services, to locate a set of web services that meet each basic operating requirement and a subset of at least one web service that meets each reputation requirement, wherein each of the web services are operable to provide interoperative functionality to the systems;
• and
• wherein the query is received at a search engine from a client, and wherein returning the subset in response to the query comprises returning a list to the client;
• wherein the list includes at least two web services, and further comprising, at the client, receiving the list and selecting a web service from the list;
• returning the subset in response to the query.

In a computing environment in which web services are used to provide computing services to clients via protocols and cross-platform standards, a method for finding and ranking web services in a manner that matches web services with a consumer's computing service needs, and which is not significantly influenced by popularity data or other manipulable data of a web service, the method comprising:

• maintaining information that identifies a plurality of web services, each web service operable to provide interoperative functionality to a computer system;
• obtaining reputation data that corresponds to schematized behavioral attributes for the plurality of web services, the at least one schematized behavioral attribute of the reputation data including at least one technical attribute unrelated to web service popularity, which is resistant to manipulation, and which relates to empirical data on at least a web service's responsiveness, wherein web service responsiveness is a measure of how often a web service reads from a specific port;
• and
• selecting a subset from the plurality of web services based on the reputation data, and excluding attributes, including popularity data, that are susceptible to manipulation by providers of the plurality of web services, and instead including the empirical data on responsiveness, the subset comprising at least one web service;
• wherein the selecting includes a server component that returns a list of at least two web services as the subset to a requesting client;
• wherein the selecting includes a client component that further narrows the list into a single selected web service.

In a computing environment in which web services are used to provide computing services to clients via protocols and cross-platform standards, a system for finding and ranking web services in a manner that matches web services with a consumer s computing service needs, and which is not significantly influenced by popularity data or other manipulable data of a web service, the system comprising,

• a client that requests a web service;
• a server that provides a web service corresponding to the requested web service, the web service operable to provide interoperative functionality to the client;
• an auditor that collects reputation data that corresponds to at least one schematized behavioral attribute for the requested web service, the behavioral attributes including technical attributes of the web service, and the technical attributes being resistant to manipulation and including empirical data on at least web service responsiveness, wherein web service responsiveness is a measure of how often a web service reads from a specific ports;
• and
• a UDDI search engine that receives the web service request from the client, identifies the server as corresponding to the requested web service, uses the reputation data, including the technical attributes relating to web service responsiveness, and excluding attributes, including popularity data, which are susceptible to manipulation by a provider of a web service, to select the web service from among other servers that provide web services that correspond to the requested web service, and returns an identifier of the server to the client in response to the request;
• wherein the search engine returns the identifier in a list of identifiers to the client, each identifier corresponding to a server that provides a web service that corresponds to the requested web service;
• wherein the list of identifiers corresponds to a narrowed subset of the other servers that provide web services that correspond to the requested web service.