Abstract. The scientific research in the area of computational mechanisms for trust and reputation in virtual societies is a recent discipline oriented to increase the reliability and performance of electronic communities. Computer science has moved from the paradigm of isolated machines to the paradigm of networks and distributed computing. Likewise, artificial intelligence is quickly moving from the paradigm of isolated and non-situated intelligence to the paradigm of situated, social and collective intelligence. The new paradigm of the so called intelligent or autonomous agents and multi-agent systems (MAS) together with the spectacular emergence of the information society technologies (specially reflected by the popularization of electronic commerce) are responsible for the increasing interest on trust and reputation mechanisms applied to electronic societies. This review wants to offer a panoramic view on current computational trust and reputation models.

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Social network analysis has been used for a long time by sociologist as a mechanism to infer and explain social behaviours. Analysing social relations between individuals in a society using social network analysis techniques allows to identify a lot of features of that society that can be very valuable in an e-commerce environment. In this paper we describe how these techniques can be used to improve a reputation system and also how this system can be integrated with a negotiation model to increase the succes of negotiations.

The use of previous direct interactions is probably the best way to calculate a reputation but, unfortunately this information is not always available. This is especially true in large multi-agent systems where interaction is scarce. In this paper we present a reputation system that takes advantage, among other things, of social relations between agents to overcome this problem.

In the area of agent-based computing there are many proposals for specific system architectures, and a number of proposals for general approaches to building agents. As yet, however, there are comparatively few attempts to relate these together, and even fewer attempts to provide methodologies which relate designs to architectures and then to executable agents. This paper provides a first attempt to address this shortcoming. We propose a general method of specifying logic-based agents, which is based on the use of multi-context systems, and give examples of its use. The resulting specifications can be directly executed, and we discuss an implementation which makes this direct execution possible.