Agent-based social assessment of shared resources

Abstract

Prior to the access to decentralized resources like web services and shared files in peer-to-peer networks, the user needs to be provided with accurate information about these resources. While some of them can be specified impartially, other descriptions might be biased by individual preferences or subjective utility, for example quality ratings or content synopsizes. Unfortunately, such assessments of distributed resources usually either solely reflect the requirements, opinion and preferences of the resource providers or single users, or they consist of plain, often overgeneralized ratings obtained from voting-based recommender systems. In contrast to these approaches, we propose an agent-based framework for the distributed assignment and social weighting of rich, multidimensional and possibly inconsistent resource descriptions obtained from the conflicting opinions of communicating agents, which compete in the assertion of individual resource assessments. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2004.