Reputation communication in HCI: challenges or opportunities?

The Web 2.0, the second generation of web applications, offers innovative ways for users to access information and to add content, in a collaborative way. Our research is focused on how those systems communicates the reputation, i.e., the validity and accuracy, of the shared information sources. This paper presents a study to characterize reputation communicability in Waze, a community-based traffic and navigation application. We used the Semiotic Inspection Method (SIM), a Semiotic Engineering evaluation method. The results indicate that the reputation communication model is a good opportunity to support decision-making at human-computer interaction time. When the reputation communicability fails, the users should decide for themselves and at their own risk about the information credibility.