Getting More from Reputation Systems: A Context–Aware Reputation Framework Based on Trust Centers and Agent Lists

Reputation is a crucial factor in trust and thus in Web communities. Trust strategies may involve investigating user reputation or directly using transitive reputation to form the Web of Trust. We suggest an approach that takes advantage of both strategies without increasing the cost of investigation. Several systems nowadays form what we call ldquouser Web communitiesrdquo. In these communities, reputation related to different contexts needs to be exchanged. The perception, calculation and interpretation of this reputation differ from one community to another. We propose the development of reference models to diminish the distance between these multi-perceptions. We also propose the use of reputation centers to facilitate reputation transfer and highlight the importance of their role in analyzing attacks on reputation.