Distributed Trust & Reputation Models using Blockchain Technologies for Tourism Crowdsourcing Platforms

Crowdsourced repositories have become an increasingly important source of information for users and businesses in multiple domains. Everyday examples of tourism crowdsourcing platforms focusing on accommodation, food or travelling in general, influence consumer behaviour in modern societies. These repositories, due to their intrinsic openness, can strongly benefit from independent data quality modelling mechanisms. In this context, building trust & reputation models of contributors and storing crowdsourced data using distributed ledger technology allows not only to ascertain the quality of crowdsourced contributions, but also ensures the integrity of the built models. This paper presents a survey on distributed trust & reputation modelling using blockchain technology and, for the specific case of tourism crowdsourcing platforms, discusses the open research problems and identifies future lines of research. 2019 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.