Reptile -> SCDS

Reptile is a reputation-enhanced portal implemented using Mozilla technologies.

Reptile is an open source/free software Syndicated Content Directory Server (SCDS) that provides a personalized news and information portal with privacy and reputation accumulation. It is intended as a reference implementation of an OpenPrivacy Agent highlighting usage of a Reputation Management Framework.

Specification

All user information in the Reptile system is owned and controlled completely by the user. No entity - including implementors of Reptile itself - can discover a pseudonymous user's true identity, though full personalization of news feeds and presentation is supported. This separates Reptile from centralized, privacy-invading systems like my.yahoo.com and O'Reilly's Meerkat.

Reptile has seven basic facilities:

Personalization and Reputation Management

Channels, articles and indeed all objects within the OpenPrivacy framework can be enhanced via the grafting of reputation objects. This provides a facility to provide feedback to the creation, delivery and presentation aspects of each object, as well as enabling threshold alerts and other advaced features.

Privacy and Nym Management

All reputation grafts (annotations of opinions and/or rankings) and subscription activities are made pseudonymously through a client-side "Primary Agent" - part of the peer-to-peer OpenPrivacy Reputation Management Framework. This Primary Agent creates and manages nyms for the user transparently, and enables the user to view, modify and/or delete reputation information whether stored locally or remotely.

Channel Creation (Anyone can publish)

Reptile users can publish their own pseudonymous RSS channels. Further, as part of channel subscription and article selection, the user may choose to publish all or part of their filtered feeds, creating a new 'virtual RSS channel' with a pseudonymous reputation.

Channel Listing

Reptile can talk to RSS channel feeds (perhaps even an OCS feed such as xmltree, 10.am, or Reuters) and list them according to a ranking determined by an incrementally developed reputation and optional user-provided bias (filtering).

Channel Subscription

The channels are presented to the user according to personal taste. The user has the ability to annotate channels - whether subscribed to or not - with reputation grafts (opinions) that may be made public at user discretion.

Article Selection

The user can refine their presentation and rate individual articles according to an open set of criteria. While the reference implementation allows only a single value, this can be expanded by plugging in n-space ontological understanding mechanisms.

Enumeration and Sorting

Both channels and articles may be displayed ranked, sorted and edited according to their reputation and user bias.

Requirements for building

• JDK version 1.2 or better (gcj, the GNU Compiler for Java, is recommended)
• Network Security Services for Java JSS 3.0 (requires NSS 3.2)
• Mozilla 0.8 or better
• Sierra Reputation Management Framework
• Talon component system