Reputation by Design: Using VDML and Service ML for Reputation Systems Modeling

Despite reputation deeply influences system providers and users interactions (e.g. In e-commerce), today implementations of reputation systems are far from being satisfactory. Reputation systems implemented so far for ecommerce are very simple and lack in showing relevant features of the service: on the one hand the representation of reputation does not distinguish different attributes concerning the entity holding the reputation, on the other hand the information used to built reputation is completely subjective, that is entirely rely on users' feedbacks, even concerning attributes that could be objectively measured. The principal cause of the problems above is that software engineering methodologies captures high level functional requirements and detail them down to system implementation but not on the reputation system side. In the present paper we start to tackle the highlighted problems by proposing an extension of Value Delivery Modeling Language and Service Modeling Language toward the representation of reputation systems concepts. The aim is to provide a model to represent reputation requirements of the system-to-be from the very beginning in the software development.