Building Web Reputation Systems

Chapter 3. Building Blocks and Reputation Tips

By now you should feel fairly conversant in the lingua franca of reputation systems (the graphical grammar presented in Chapter 2), and you’ve had some exposure to their constituent bits and pieces. We’ve gone over reputation statements, messages, and processes, and you’ve become familiar with some rudimentary but serviceable models.

In this chapter, we “level up” and explore reputation claims in greater detail. We describe a taxonomy of claim types, exploring reputation roll-ups: actual computations on incoming messages that affect a particular output. Functionally, different types of roll-ups yield very different types of reputations, so we offer guidance on when to use which roll-ups. We end the chapter with practical advice in a section of “practitioner’s tricks.”

Extending the Grammar: Building Blocks

Though understanding the elements of the reputation grammar is essential, building reputation models from the atoms up every time is time consuming and tedious. There’s a lot of benefit to developing tools and shorthand for common patterns and using those to configure reputation statements and templates for well-understood reputation models.

The Data: Claim Types

Remember, a fundamental component of a reputation statement is the claim—the assertion of quality that a source makes about a target. In The Reputation Statement, we discussed how claims can be either explicit (a direct statement of quality, intended by the statement’s source ...