Building Web Reputation Systems

Chapter 2. A (Graphical) Grammar for Reputation

The phrase reputation system describes a wide array of practices, technologies, and user-interface elements. In this chapter, we’ll build a visual “grammar” to describe the attributes, processes, and presentation of reputation systems. We’ll use this grammar throughout subsequent chapters to describe existing reputation systems and define new ones. Furthermore, you should be able to use this grammar as well—both to understand and diagram common reputation systems, and to design systems of your own.

Meta-modeling: A formalized specification of domain-specific notations…following a strict rule set.

—http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metamodeling

Much reputation-related terminology is inconsistent, confusing, and even contradictory, depending on what site you visit or which expert opinion you read. Over the last 30 years, we’ve evaluated and developed scores of online and offline reputation systems and identified many concepts and attributes common to them all; enough similarity that we propose a common lexicon and a “graphical grammar”—the common concepts, attributes, and methods involved—to build a foundation for a shared understanding of reputation systems.

Why propose a graphical grammar? Reputation is an abstract concept, and deploying it usually requires the participation of many people. In practice, we’ve consistently seen that having a two-dimensional drawing of the reputation model facilitates the design and implementation phases of the ...