What is Reputation Object

Business often develop proprietary reputation systems for their community, with the side effect of locking users into that service if they wish to maintain their reputation (Bonawitz, Chandrasekhar, & Viana, 2004). Reputation is used in multi-agent models like e-commerce, and distributed computation and reasoning. Currently, virtual communities are using their own reputation values only without exchanging knowledge. Reputation transfer or portability is a controversial subject that is considered either not applicable or of high potentials. Trust is used to carry out decisions in case of uncertainty. In that sense it is used in peer-to-peer (P2P) networks to facilitate its interactions. In P2P networks, peers’ willingness to share the content they have and forward the queries plays an important role during the content search process. Using reputation in P2P systems can be an incentive for peers to cooperate. The goal is to have dynamic social networks that work on acquiring, processing, establishing, analyzing, exchanging and evolving of knowledge. In this chapter, the authors are focusing on the use of one of the trust management approaches, namely the reputation-based approach. The connections of trust management to the classic IT security disciplines authorization, trust, and identity management will be laid out. With this background, a generic architecture for context-aware reputation systems, which can interact with identity-related services like identity providers and policy decision or enforcement points, is presented. More specialized architectures for different environments—business- or consumer-oriented—will be derived from the generic architecture.