Patent ID: 7937480

Claim:
A computer-implemented reputation system, the system comprising: a centralized reputation engine operable to receive feedback from a plurality of local reputation engines, the plurality of local reputation engines being operable to determine local reputations based upon of one or more entities and respectively associated with the local reputation engines; an aggregation engine operable to derive a global reputation for a queried entity based upon an aggregation of the plurality of local reputations; and wherein; the centralized reputation engine is operable to provide the global reputation of the queried entity to one or more of the local reputation engines responsive to receiving a reputation query from said one or more of the local reputation engines; the centralized reputation engine is operable to apply, for each local reputation engine that originates a reputation query, a local reputation bias to the global reputation based on preferences of the local reputation engine to generate a local reputation for the local reputation engine from the global reputation, so that for each local reputation engine a different local reputation is generated from the global reputation.