Ratings in Distributed Systems: A Bayesian Approach

For distributed systems at large and e-commerce systems in particular, ratings play an increasingly important role. Ratings confer reputation measures about sources. This paper reports our formalization of the rating process. This paper argues that ratings should be context- and individual- dependent quantities. In contrast to existing rating systems in many e-commerce or developer sites, our approach makes use of personalized and contextualized ratings for assessing source reputation. Our approach is based on a Bayesian probabilistic framework.