Unifying Framework for Building Social Computing Applications

There have been a number of frameworks and models developed to support different aspects of social computing. Some were developed to deal with online interaction through the application of computer-mediated communications tools, whereas others such as social network analyses and reputation systems were more specific in their focus. While these methodologies are interrelated, current social computing research has dealt with them as separate aspects. This paper presents a comprehensive framework for social computing that aims at integrating all these three aspects into a unified model so that discovery and exploration of community members are not only made possible, but also optimized. The novelty of the proposed approach stems from: (1) integration of social interaction, social network analysis and social reputation domains; (2) incorporating many flexible and practical features such as individual- and group-level perceptions of trust in social relations for different social contexts; and (3) using path-related algorithms for selection and discovery of target community members. A description of the proposed model and its implementation are presented. This research is expected to assist online community members to make decisions that facilitate the discovery of people and their connections while promoting increased awareness of community structure and information exposure

Fuzzy logic techniques for reputation management in anonymous peer-to-peer systems

Emerging approaches to enforce some form of protection in (pseudo)anonymous peer to peer systems propose the use of reputations as a means to establish the reliability of servents and/or resources. How such reputations can be exchanged, aggregated and used in actually determining the trust one may wish to put in a servent or resource is an issue still to be investigated and for which fuzzy techniques can play an important role. We present an approach for managing and exchanging reputations, based on the use of fuzzy techniques, which we adopted as part of our P2P-XRep system