Abstract
Reputation is used to regulate relationships of trust in
online communities. When deploying a reputation system, it
needs to accommodate the requirements and constrains of the
specific community in order to assist the community to reach
their goals. This paper identifies that there is a need for a
framework to define a configurable reputation system with the
ability to accommodate the requirements of a variety of online
communities. Such a reputation system can be defined as a
service on the Cloud, to be composed with the application
environment of the online community. This paper introduces the
concept of RaaS (Reputation-as-a-Service) and discusses a
potential framework for creating a RaaS. In order to achieve
such a framework, research is conducted into features of SaaS
(Software-as-a-Service) components, user requirements for trust
and reputation, and features of current reputation frameworks
that can be configured in order to support a reputation service on
the Cloud.