Studying How E-Markets Evaluation Can Enhance Trust in Virtual Business Communities



428 Studying How E-Markets Evaluation Can Enhance Trust in Virtual Business Communities

usually have limited information about its reliability and product/service quality before the
transaction. Therefore, alternative sources of information, other than own experience, have to
be used to help a potential business partner decide whether a particular e-market should be
trusted and a transaction can be safely carried out with it. One of the major constituents that
can facilitate this decision is the opinion of other business partners that have previously been
engaged in a transaction with the particular e-market. In the context of a virtual community
(VC) of business partners, this opinion can take the form of e-markets’ evaluations, which can
be collected from the VC members. These collected evaluations can serve as a common corpus
of knowledge and experience, which can be taken advantage of in order to help the VC
members in selecting appropriate e-markets to commit transactions with.

In this paper, we present an e-market recommendation algorithm that takes advantage of this
common knowledge and experience in the VC. More specifically, the paper first identifies a
metadata model for storing multi-criteria evaluations of e-markets. Metadata (data about an
information source or simply “data about data”) is generally used to describe information
resources, in order to facilitate their categorization, storage, search and retrieval (Miller, 1996).
Second, it demonstrates how this meta-model can serve as the basis for developing a
recommendation algorithm that synthesizes the evaluations that members of a VC have
provided, in order to propose appropriate e-markets to other members. Third, this paper
examines the applicability of this algorithm, by presenting how it can support the members of
an Organic Agriculture VC to find trustful e-markets with certified organic products.

2. Metadata for evaluating e-markets

Several evaluation instruments (e.g. online questionnaires) exist that measure the satisfaction
of a business partner from the use of an e-market. Examples of such instruments include the
proposals of Barnes & Vidgen (2002), Mich et al. (2003), and Olsina Santos & Rossi (2002).
To collect and store e-market evaluations that are provided from such instruments, we have
developed the E-Commerce Evaluation Metadata (ECEM) model that uses a common and
reusable XML data format to store information (Manouselis, 2005; Manouselis &
Costopoulou, 2005). ECEM is a metadata model that facilitates the description of evaluation
instruments for e-markets and the storage of evaluation results. The proposed e-market
recommendation algorithm requires the use of a subset of the ECEM metadata elements, the
experience ECEM (expECEM) subset. This subset includes elements that do not store
information about the instrument itself, but rather the evaluation experience results. In
particular, expECEM consists of the following elements:

Title: refers to a title used to distinguish the evaluation experience from others.

Description: contains a short description of the experience.

Source: includes a reference to a resource from which the experience can be acquired from.

Meta-Metadata: contains information about who contributed the experience. It identifies
the metadata record in a classification system (e.g. a database with experience descriptions).



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