OASIS Open Reputation Management Systems (ORMS) Technical Committee

OASIS recently announced the formation of a new technical committee to
make it easier to validate the trustworthiness of businesses, projects,
and people working and socializing in electronic communities. The OASIS
Open Reputation Management Systems (ORMS) Technical Committee will
define common data formats for consistently and reliably representing
reputation scores. ORMS will be relevant for a variety of applications
including validating the trustworthiness of sellers and buyers in online
auctions, detecting free riders in peer-to-peer networks, and helping
to ensure the authenticity of signature keys in a web of trust. ORMS
will also help enable smarter searching of web sites, blogs, events,
products, companies, and individuals. Because the majority of existing
on-line rating, scoring and reputation mechanisms have been developed
by private companies using proprietary schemas, there is currently no
common method to query, store, aggregate, or verify claims between
systems. The different sources of reputation data -- user feedback
channels (product ratings, comment forms), online user profiles, etc. --
are each uniquely susceptible to bad actors, manipulation of data for
specific purposes, and spammers. ORMS will not attempt to define
algorithms for computing reputation scores. Instead, the OASIS Committee
will provide the means for understanding the relevancy of a score within
a given context.

OASIS Open Reputation Management Systems (ORMS) Technical Committee

OASIS has issued a Call for Participation in the newly formed Open
Reputation Management Systems (ORMS) TC. The TC intends to develop an
Open Reputation Management System (ORMS) that provides the ability to
use common data formats for representing reputation data, and standard
definitions of reputation scores. The system will not define algorithms
for computing the scores. However, it will provide the means for
understanding the relevancy of a score within a given transaction. The
TC's output will enable the deployment of a distributed reputation
systems that can be either centralized or decentralized with the
ability for aggregators and intermediaries to be part of the business
model. The group will develop use cases to gather requirements that
ORMS will need to meet and understand the business and social impact
of such a system including security, privacy, threats and risks
requirements will also be developed. Explore the use of reputation
mechanisms in novel settings. The members plan to development a
framework for reputation data gathering including: (1) Development of
common data models for expressing reputation data; (2) XML Schema for
representing ORMS data; (3) XML Schema for Reputation Score; (4)
Development of standard way of exchanging reputation claims among
systems; (5) Development of means of aggregating reputation data
including delegation of claims generations and assertions; (6)
Development of query/response communication protocols for exchanging
reputation data in a trusted and secure fashion. This step may develop
a new protocol, or extend current ones such as SAML, OpenID etc. The
increasing reliance on the Internet as a medium for social interaction
and online collaboration, and the emergence of converged networks with
ubiquitous services that span different wire-line, wireless, mobile
networks, devices, and users are placing new emphasis for developing
reputation mechanisms for electronics based communities. The use of
reputation systems has been proposed for various applications such as
validating the trustworthiness of sellers and buyers in online auctions,
detecting free riders in peer to peer networks, ensuring the authenticity
of signature keys in a web of trust, supporting smarter searching of
web sites, blogs, events, products, companies and other individuals.