A Bi-rating Based Personalized Trust Management Model for Virtual Communities

Virtual community is becoming a promising network application in the open, decentralized networks. Trust management mechanism is crucial to fertilize the development of virtual communities. After analyzing the features of virtual communities and various approaches for trust management, we present a novel bi-rating based personalized trust management model for virtual communities. We differentiate provision trust from recommendation trust, and define three basic attributions for each community member: reputation, recommendation trust and community active value. A new rating verification scheme and some new algorithms which can alleviate the influence of malicious members are introduced in this paper. Our trust model satisfies the time-dependence, history-dependence, and subjectivity properties of trust. The metrics we used in this model are helpful to motivate virtual community members to participate in community affairs and strengthen the community as well. Because this model requires little resources for system storage, traffic load and processing, this proposal is efficient and feasible to virtual communities