Towards Reputation-as-a-Service

Reputation is used to regulate relationships of trust in online communities. When deploying a reputation system, it needs to accommodate the requirements and constrains of the specific community in order to assist the community to reach their goals. This paper identifies that there is a need for a framework to define a configurable reputation system with the ability to accommodate the requirements of a variety of online communities. Such a reputation system can be defined as a service on the Cloud, to be composed with the application environment of the online community. This paper introduces the concept of RaaS (Reputation-as-a-Service) and discusses a potential framework for creating a RaaS. In order to achieve such a framework, research is conducted into features of SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) components, user requirements for trust and reputation, and features of current reputation frameworks that can be configured in order to support a reputation service on the Cloud.