A system which takes feedback from users in the form of certifications and provides a mechanism to
accumulate these and determine the quality (or reputation) of a
given resource based on this feedback.
A reputation system must combine at least one trust metric, and
certification system.
Distributed Reputation System
A distributed reputation system provides the same core functionality as
a reputation system with the
major difference being that it is distributed and works in a P2P
and decentralized fashion.
It is very important to make the distinction between a distributed
reputation system and a normal (non-distributed) reputation system
because distributed systems are much harder to build yet provide a
lot more functionality such as perspective, lack of centralized (and
potentially corrupt) control, and scalability.
NewsMonster Distributed Reputation System
An implementation of a Distributed Reputation System which uses Blognet as a backend for discovery and exchange of
certifications. The certification format is based on RDF and is fully
open. The trust metric will be similar in many respects to the one used
in Advogato.
Trust Network
Web of Trust
The term web of trust was initially introduced with PGP to
describe the trust relationships between users and their cryptographic
public keys. The PGP web of trust allows it to operate without a
centralized authority for the verification of keys (no Certificate
Authority).
Whuffie
Term coined by Cory Doctorow to
describe a futuristic reputation based currency system in Down and Out in the Magic
Kingdom. Whuffie is very similar to the Distributed
Patron Protocol in many ways. Whuffie penetrated every aspect of
human life and allowed civilization to move beyond the limits of
ordinary currencies.
Trust Metric
A Trust Metric provides the brains behind a reputation system. Advogato is one example of a Trust Metric. The
design of Advogato is very advanced and influenced the design of
NewsMonster in a number of areas.
Advogato
Advogato is a community site for
free software developers. It also serves as a research test-bed for
research on group trust metrics for peer certification.
Distributed Patron Protocol
The Distributed Patron Protocol (DPP) is a payment reinforcement
mechanism based on reputation. The DPP creates a feedback loop
within the community in order to reward patrons who donate funds
towards worthy causes.
NewsMonster will include an implementation of the DPP in Beta3 which
should be available in a few weeks.
Term for one major feature of a distributed reputation system. A
reputation system can be said to provide perspective when the
user can configure their own trust metric and give positive certifications to some users while excluding
or providing negative certifications to other users. The end result is
that the user is able to find high quality information that they
care about and not something that was chosen by a mass of people.
Certification
The process of asserting that a user or resource in a reputation
system posses a certain quality. For example a certification can be
represented as Alice is intelligent. All reputation systems
include at least one certification system but may include others
with provide additional functionality including compatibility with
another certification system or use an additional vocabulary.
Direct Certification
The process of a user certifying another. We are now 1 degree away from
this user and in most situations this certification will be worth more
in a trust metric than a transitive
certification. For example Alice thinks Bob is very trustworthy
is an example of a direct certification.
Indirect Certification
A certification computed within a trust metric by using transitive
trust. Essentially this is a collection of two or more direct
certifications that form a chain between peers in the system. For
example Alice thinks Bob is very trustworthy and Bob thinks
Carol is very trustworthy is an example of an indirect certification
between Alice and Carol.
Direct Trust Network
The collection of all direct certifications made by the current user.
Transitive Trust
In a trust network the user can make direct certifications between themselves and other
users. If the trust metric supports transitive trust we can use
the certifications of other users in addition to the certifications in
the users direct trust network. For example if we have the a direct certification from Alice to Bob,
Alice could use the certification between Bob and Carol in a transitive
manner to discovery statements made by Carol.
Trust Horizon
If a reputation system supports transitive
trust it can be said that its trust horizon is the distance in the
trust network where trust thresholds
eventually terminate. For example Alice can trust Bob but if Bob does
not trust Carol then the trust horizon is between Bob and Carol.
Moderation System
Moderation systems provide the ability to take a list of items (usually
comments, emails, usenet posts, etc) and sort them based on relevance.
For example Slashdot provides a
moderation system that allows users to sort comments on the system based
on feedback from moderators.
Blognet
Blognet is the P2P
network used within NewsMonster to provide the infrastructure
we need to connect weblog users together in order to build a trust
network.
Blognet is based on the mod_link and mod_subscription
specifications and uses our open certification format to represent
certifications between other RSS (Blognet) nodes and resources.
Top 40 Effect
The effect in most current moderation systems where only
popular content rises to the surface. While this is nice in some
circumstances one ends up with content such as Brittany Spears and
other popular content.
The problem with the top 40 effect is that nothing of extreme
interest every rises to the surface. There is nothing ever
politically incorrect and nothing that may be of interest to an
individual user. Essentially we end up with a tragedy of the
commons.
RSS
RSS is an acronym for Rich Site Summary, an XML format for
distributing news headlines on the Web, also known as
syndication.
First started by Netscape as part of the My Netscape site, it
expanded through Dave Winer and Userland. RSS started off in an
RDF format, but RSS 0.91 (the current version) is not, which
leads to some annoying issues when trying to parse different
pages.
Definition: The Semantic Web is the abstract representation of
data on the World Wide Web, based on the RDF standards and other
standards to be defined. It is being developed by the W3C, in
collaboration with a large number of researchers and industrial
partners.
'The Semantic Web is an extension of the current web in which
information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling
computers and people to work in cooperation.' -- Tim
Berners-Lee, James Hendler, Ora Lassila, The Semantic Web,
Scientific American, May 2001
Term for an RSS 1.0 feature where the full content of the original
article is encoded inline within the RSS. This is a very nice
feature as it allows one to read the full article contents within
their RSS aggregator.
Some websites don't provided content:encoded RSS because they need
more hits to their website in order to increase their ad
click-through rate which increases their revenue necessary for
running the website.
RDF (Resource Description Format)
The Resource Description Framework (RDF) integrates a variety of
applications from library catalogs and world-wide directories to
syndication and aggregation of news, software, and content to
personal collections of music, photos, and events using XML as an
interchange syntax. The RDF specifications provide a lightweight
ontology system to support the exchange of knowledge on the Web.
