Exploring the Popularity, Reputation and Certification of User-Generated Software

User-Generated Content has reshaped the landscape of the Information Marketplace during the last years. Among the content, software is a very impacting class. In comparison to regular resource, the estimation of popularity, reputation and certification of user-generated software in distributed architecture appears to be a challenging task. Furthermore how to use popularity to help user to discover the most suitable software, how to use reputation to allow users to evaluate and be aware of the quality of packages circulating on the Web, and how to use certification to assist user in choosing a safe software, these become very important, but more difficult compared with the traditional software system in a distributed environment. In this report, basic concepts of popularity, reputation and certification and their state of the art approaches are introduced and analyzed. Then we introduce software deployment system and reveal the impact of popularity, reputation and certification on it. After this, we revisit the current methods and theories of estimation, and propose an adaptive distributed architecture and several algorithms for estimating popularity, reputation and certification. At last, some open issues concerning full distributed popularity and reputation estimation, the establishment of software-related social network and so on are highlighted for future research