STORE Stochastic Reputation Service for Virtual Organisations

Virtual Organizations (VOs) are an emerging business model in today’s Internet economy. Increased specialization and focusing on an organization’s core competencies requires such novel models to address business opportunities. In a VO, a set of sovereign, geographically dispersed organizations temporarily pool their resources to jointly address a business opportunity. The decision making process determining which potential partners are invited to join the VO is crucial with respect to entire VO’s success. A reputation system can provide additional decision support besides the a priori knowledge about potential partners. To achieve this in this demonstrator, reputation, an objective trust measure, is aggregated from multiple independent trust sources that inherently characterize an organization’s reliability. To allow for the desired predictions of an organization’s future performance, a stochastic modeling approach is chosen. This demonstrator presents a research prototype of the full Reputation Service for VOs including a web based User Interface.