Visualizing Transaction Context in Trust and Reputation Systems

Transaction context is an important aspect that should be taken into account for reputation-based trust assessment, because referrals are bound to the situation-specific context in which they were created. The non-consideration of transaction context may cause several threats such as the value imbalance problem. Exploiting this weakness, a seller can build high reputation by selling cheap products while cheating on the expensive ones. In the recent years, multiple approaches have been introduced that address this challenge. All of them chose metrics leading to numerical reputation values. These values, however, are non-transparent and quite hard to understand for the end-user. In this work, in contrast, we combine reputation assessment and visual analytics to provide an interactive visualization of multivariate reputation data. We thereby allow the user to analyze the data sets and draw conclusions by himself. In this way, we enhance transparency, involve the user in the evaluation process and as a consequence increase the users' trust in the reputation system.