Reputation objects for interoperable reputation exchange: Implementation and design decisions

Reputation systems aim to provide a mechanism for establishing trust for online interactions attempting to mimic their real-world counterparts. Reputation-based approaches depend on the users local experiences and feedback to create a soft measure for trust decision. They use various clues and past experience to decide on taking the risk of dealing with an entity. Reputation communities cannot exchange reputation or reputation information following an isolated-silos approach. The reasons for this varies from missing contexts in the reputation representations and heterogeneity in these representations, to technical reasons such as not being represented in an interoperable knowledge representation method. Developing interoperable reputation ontologies requires a technology that can provide means of integrating data sources and methods to relate the data to its explicit semantics. In this paper, we describe our design decisions in developing our reputation object (RO) ontology using semantic web technologies. The main motivation that leads these decision is to facilitate reputation information exchange or reputation interoperability along with model expressivity. Therefore, choosing the ontology language and specific APIs is explained in relation to this motivation.