As part of the TEXO project, TRICE is one of several research projects within the THESEUS program, one of the biggest research programs initiated by the Federal Ministry of Economy and Technology (BMWi) in Germany.
The TEXO project aims at establishing a technical standard for new service marketplaces in the footsteps of other online marketplaces such as Amazon, eBay or Expedia with the goal of encouraging business transactions between potentially unknown participants. Trust reduces the uncertainty and risk associated with such interactions and enables users to make more informed decisions about the expected quality of service or the trustworthiness in the behavior of a certain service provider.
While TEXO provides a platform for service management over the Internet, TRICE extends the TEXO service marketplace with mechanisms for quality and trust assessment of services and service providers. TRICE goals are to develop models and methods for deriving quality and trust values by applying trust metrics on both static data (service descriptions, service-level agreements, feedback, rating) and operational data (monitoring data).
TRICE follows a user-centric approach; it assesses the trustworthiness of services based on user trust policies. The TRICE trust assessment component enables a trust-driven search, i.e., it provides the ability to search for trustworthy services and providers based on user preferences. An additional goal of the TRICE project is an extension of the USDL (Unified Service Description Language) with elements for feedback description that allows service providers to model domain-specific feedback aspects, while keeping user ratings comparable.