Sharing Reputation Across Virtual Communities

Abstract

Trust and reputation systems for virtual communities are gaining increasing research attention. These systems track members' activities and obtain their reputation to improve the quality of member interactions and reduce the effect of fraudulent members. As virtual communities become a central playground for internet users, the reputation a member gains within a community may be viewed as a social credential. These credentials can serve the user as a means for promoting her status in new communities on one hand, and on the other hand assist virtual communities to broaden their knowledge about users with relatively low activity volume. The Cross-Community Reputation (CCR) model was designed for sharing reputation knowledge across communities. The model identifies the fundamental terms that are required for a meaningful sharing of reputation information between communities and proposes methods to make that information sharing feasible within the boundaries of users' and communities' policies. This paper presents the CR model and draws the architecture guidelines for designing an infrastructure to support it. The proposed model is evaluated by using a sample of real-world users' ratings as well as by conducting a dedicated experiment with real users. The results of the experimental evaluation demonstrate the effectiveness of the CCR model in various aspects.

The Next Generation Information Infrastructure for International Trade

“…Customs will monitor the process by which the trader operates, not the outcome of the process as normal. There is thus a fundamental difference to most of the trust-models that are applied throughout the internet were trust is based on transaction history [1], [18]: you trust an e-Bay vendor based on 97% satisfied customers -not based on you knowing exactly how the vendor operates internally. To have the latter insight, a computerized II where all processes leaves digital traces is fundamental.…”

Reputation - from Social Perception to Internet Security

“…In this section we briefly describe the way reputation is aggregated from several communities using the CCR model [9,5]. The CCR model defines the major stages required to aggregate the reputation of a community member with the reputation of that member in other communities.…”

“…The third stage maps the specific attributes that are used to compute the reputation in the two communities (e.g., the attribute "prediction accuracy" in the football community may be partially mapped to the attribute "general reliability" in the basketball community). A detailed mathematical model which explains the process of the mapping and aggregation of CCR, is described in [5]. The CCR model was implemented as the TRIC software.…”

“…TRIC is concerned primarily with aggregating different reputation mechanisms across communities and with protecting user rights to privacy and control over data during this aggregation. The CCR computation process [5] begins when a requesting community that wishes to receive CCR data regarding one of its users, sends a request to relevant responding communities. Communities that have reputation data of the user and are willing to share the information reply with the relevant reputation data.…”

“…Thus the need arises to aggregate reputation from multiple communities. We developed the Cross-Community Reputation (CCR) model for the sharing of reputation knowledge across virtual communities [5,6,9]. The CCR model is aimed at leveraging reputation data from multiple communities to obtain more accurate reputation.…”