Experiments on semantic interoperability of agent reputation models using the SOARI architecture

In the last decades, we have experienced a rapid increase in the number of available online e-services. Agent-based computing has been advocated as a natural computational model to automate the interaction with those services, thus enabling the formation of multiagent systems. In these latter, agents may use trust and reputation as the main control mechanism and they usually exchange such information in order to accelerate reputation evaluation. However, due to the semantic heterogeneity of the different reputation models, agents interaction about reputation has to deal with interoperability issues. Therefore, this paper presents some experiments using SOARI, an architecture that enables the semantic interoperability among agents that have heterogeneous reputation models. Such experiments were conducted using two reputation testbeds and three agent reputation models in order to analyze the accuracy of the agents reputation evaluation in the presence of a more expressive communication apparatus, as well as the effect of the heterogeneity among reputation models on this accuracy. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.