OASIS Members Form Committee to Standardize Methods for Evaluating Online Reputations

["Carol Geyer" <carol.geyer@oasis-open.org>]

** Link to this press release at
http://www.oasis-open.org/news/oasis-news-2008-04-02.php **

OASIS Members Form New Committee to Standardize Methods for Evaluating Online
Reputations 

BEA, IBM, Sun Microsystems, AOL, Booz Allen Hamilton, CA, Cordance, Google,
NeuStar,  NRI, VeriSign, and Others Collaborate on Open Reputation Management
Systems

Boston, MA, USA; 2 April 2008 -  OASIS, the international open standards
consortium, has formed a new technical committee to make it easier to validate
the trustworthiness of businesses, projects, and people working and socializing
in electronic communities. The new 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.

"The use of the Internet as a medium for social interaction, commerce, and
collaboration places new emphasis on the need for standard reputation
mechanisms. More and more, trust is based on verifiable claims and opinions of
others online," explained Abbie Barbir of Nortel. "As the convener of the OASIS
ORMS Technical Committee, I see that the challenge to be addressed with this
new work is to define open reputation management systems that enable large sets
of different and possibly contradictory opinions about a person, company, or
product to be evaluated in a fair and meaningful way."

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 provide standard ways to express assertions, evaluations and
comparisons of rating and reputation data, making it easier to consume that
data, aggregate it, and even 'rate the raters'," said James Bryce Clark,
director of standards development at OASIS. "This will make systems less
susceptible to data manipulation, and help make trustworthiness scores more
usable, constructive and contextually relevant."

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. 

ORMS will be offered for implementation on a Royalty-Free basis. The new
technical committee will hold its first meeting on 1-2 May, in conjunction with
the OASIS Open Standards 2008 symposium in Santa Clara, California.
Participation in the OASIS ORMS Technical Committee remains open to all
interested parties. Archives of the work will be accessible to both members and
non-members, and OASIS will offer a mechanism for public comment.  The ORMS
Technical Committee is affiliated with the OASIS IDtrust Member Section, a
group that promotes greater understanding and adoption of standards-based
identity and trusted infrastructure technologies, policies, and practices. 

Support for ORMS

BEA
"BEA is pleased to join in this effort," said Hal Lockhart, Office of the CTO
at BEA Systems. "Developing reputation management standards is important to
enabling agile business processes."

CA
"CA welcomes and supports the formation of the OASIS ORMS Technical Committee.
Reputation on the Internet and within the enterprise is a critical aspect of
managing trust among participants in business transactions and social
collaborations," said Vadim Lander, CA chief security architect. "Having an
open standard for managing and providing reputation services will simplify the
ability to include this important information in identity security solutions
resulting in more secure and satisfactory business relationships."

Cordance
"Reputation systems will without doubt play a major role in the emerging
Internet identity layer," said Drummond Reed, Chief Architect of Cordance
Corporation and co-chair of the OASIS XRI (Extensible Resource Identifier) and
XDI (XRI Data Interchange) Technical Committees. "In fact, a key purpose of the
XRI digital identifier and XDI data sharing specifications is to provide the
building blocks Internet reputation systems will need. So we are very pleased
to be a founding member of the ORMS TC."

IBM
"With the increasing use of 'strong' identities, regulated or unregulated,
reputation plays an important part in the process of tracking an entity's
actions and creating a feedback loop for analysis of that data," said Anthony
Nadalin, IBM Distinguished Engineer and chief security architect for IBM Tivoli
Software. "The goal of this technical community is to look at standardized
algorithms for this analysis and common data formats to develop working
interoperability between these various reputation systems."

Additional information:

OASIS ORMS Technical Committee 
http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/orms/

IDtrust XML.org
http://idtrust.xml.org/

Open Standards 2008: Composability within SOA
http://events.oasis-open.org/home/symposium/2008/




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and law, localisation, supply chains, XML processing, and other areas of need
identified by its members. OASIS open standards offer the potential to lower
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http://www.oasis-open.org


Press contact:
Carol Geyer
OASIS Director of Communications
carol.geyer@oasis-open.org
+1.978.667.5115 x209 (office)
+1.941.284.0403 (mobile)