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

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

5. Conclusions

One of the major drawbacks of conducting business online is the raised level of risk associated
with business transactions. Potential business partners usually have limited information about
each other’s reliability or product /service quality before the transaction. In this paper, we
presented an e-market recommendation algorithm that aims to support members of a business
VC. In particular, this paper first introduced the expECEM metadata elements for collecting
and storing e-market evaluations from the VC members. Second, it described the design of a
multi-criteria recommendation algorithm that can synthesize past evaluations in order to
propose appropriate e-markets to the VC members. Finally, it has demonstrated a scenario of
applying the e-market recommendation algorithm in the context of the BIO@GRO Web portal
for organic agriculture, in order to support the members of an agribusiness VC to find suitable
e-markets with certified organic products.

6. Acknowledgements

The work presented in this paper has been partially funded by the European Commission, and
more specifically the project No EDC-11293 “BIO@GRO: Demonstration of an online
Multilingual Biological Agriculture eServices System for Organic Farmers, Traders,
Institutions and Citizens” of the eContent Programme.

7. References

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