Building Web Reputation Systems

Appendix A. The Reputation Framework

The reputation framework is the software that forms the execution environment for reputation models. This appendix takes a deeper and much more technical look at the framework. The first section is intended for software architects and technically minded product managers to generate appropriate requirements for implementation and possible reuse by other applications.

The second section of this appendix describes two different reputation frameworks with very different sets of requirements in detail: the Invisible Reputation Framework and the Yahoo! Reputation Platform.

This appendix talks about messaging systems, databases, performance, scale, reliability, etc., and you can safely skip it if you are not interested in such gory internals.

Reputation Framework Requirements

This section helps you identify the requirements for your reputation framework. As with all projects, the toughest requirements can be stated as a series of trade-offs. When selecting the requirements for your framework, be certain that they consider its total lifetime, meeting the needs at the beginning of your project and going forward, as your application grows and becomes successful.

Keep in mind that your first reputation model may be just one of several to utilize your reputation framework. Also, your reputation system is only a small part of an application…it shouldn’t be the only part.

• Are your reputation calculations static or dynamic? Static means that you can compute your ...