Towards defining an ontology for reputation

The growing development of Web based trust and reputation systems in the 21st century will have powerful social and economic impact on all business entities, and will make transparent the quality assessment and customer assurance realities in the distributed Web based service oriented environments. The Web based trust and reputation systems will be the foundation for Web intelligence in the future. Trust and reputation systems help capture business intelligence through establishing customer relationships, learning consumer behavior, capturing market reaction on products and services, disseminating customer feedback, buyers´ opinions and end-user recommendations, and revealing dishonest services, unfair trading, biased assessment, discriminatory actions, fraudulent behaviors, and untrue advertising. The continuing development of these technologies will help in the improvement of professional business behavior, sales, reputation of sellers, providers, products and services. However there has been no effort in defining ontology for reputation. In this paper we attempt to define ontology for reputation.