Trust and reputation in and across virtual communities

Abstract

Trust and Reputation systems have become key enablers of positive interaction experiences on the Web. These systems accumulate information regarding activities of people or peers in general, to infer their reputation in some context or within a virtual community. Reputation information improves the quality of interactions between peers and reduces the effect of fraudulent members. In this tutorial we motivate the use of trust and reputation systems and survey some of the important models introduced in the past decade. Among these models, we present our work on the knot model, which deals with communities of strangers. Special attention is given to the way existing models tackle attempts to attack reputation systems. In a dynamic world, a person or a service may be a member of multiple communities and valuable information can be gained by sharing reputation of members among communities. In the second part of the tutorial, we present the CCR model for sharing reputation across virtual communities and address major privacy concerns related to it. In the third part of our talk, we discuss the use of reputation systems in other contexts, such as domain reputation for fighting malware, and outline our research directions on this subject. © 2013 Authors.