Towards a Multiagent System for Competitive Website Ratings

Websites usually appear to the web surfer like isolated islands: Their self-description and their hyperlinks linking to other sites reflect solely the requirements, opinion and preferences of the respective site owner, there is no explicit relation to the information, service and product offers of competing sites, and the assessment of the site by other users is unknown as well. In contrast to usual recommendation systems, this paper outlines a multiagent system which derives multidimensional website ratings from the possibly conflicting opinions of interacting rating agents witch compete in the assertion of their individual ratings against others to provide a “socially enhanced” solution for this well-known problem. The rating agents act as representatives for individual web users, interest groups, other web sites, private or public organizations, and represent their ratings in an open discussion forum which is attached to the rated web site. This forum is continuously observed by a rating instance which computes rich, social weighted general ratings of different abstraction level from the forum communications. In contrast to the results of usual majority voting based recommendation systems, these general ratings take into account the social structures like norms and roles which emerge from the agents communication process. In addition to the presentation of general ratings to the web surfer, the ratings and the social structures can also be queried by the rating agents themselves to improve their rating capabilities.