Task: Design a Reputation System
Design the architecture and the interface of a reputation system.
Disciplines: Architecture
Purpose
A reputation system is useful in large systems where interactions between specific agents are infrequent.
Relationships
Parent Practices
InputsMandatory:
    		Optional:
      Outputs
        Main Description

        In systems in which many agents interact with each other and a high fluctuation of interaction partners can be expected, direct trust based on personal experiences is often too limited. Instead, a reputation system that aggregates trust values created by the agents or collects experiences and transforms them with a trust metric can be used to allow agents to gauge previously unknown partners. Such a system thus helps to spread information about other agents in the system and can be a basis for trustworthy interaction even in cases in which individual pairings are unique occurences.

        It is recommended to use existing reputation system architectures whenever possible. Such architectures can be broadly distinguished into centralised and decentralised approaches. In the former case, the reputation system has a central manager that gathers and aggregates data and is the reference for all agents in the system. In the latter case, a number of such agents exist or reputation is calculated in a fully decentralised fashion as a form of gossipping.

        Steps
        Design the architecture of the reputation system
        The literature proposes different architectures for reputation systems that can be reused when designing one for the considered system. Usually, a reputation manager is used that either collects experiences from the agents and processes them itself or it gathers trust values directly which are then aggregated. Such a manager can either be centralised or distributed.
        Define the interface for gathering the information necessary to calculate a reputation value
        Agents can either contribute their experiences or trust values continuously or the reputation system can request them when they are needed. In both cases, interfaces have to be defined that facilitate this exchange of information.
        Define the interface and protocol for querying the reputation of an agent
        Agents need to have the possibility to query the reputation of potential interaction partners. The reputation system thus has to provide an appropriate interface and protocol to make this data accessible.
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        Concepts
        Whitepapers

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        © Copyright 2013, 2014 by Institute for Software & Systems Engineering, University of Augsburg
        © Copyright 2015 by Chalmers | University of Gothenburg
        Contributors
        Contact: Jan-Philipp Steghöfer
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        Parts of this material is based on the Eclipse Process Framework Practice Library, distributed under the Eclipse Public License V1.0.