Online reputation management deals with monitoring and influencing the online record of a person, an organization or a product. The Social Web offers increasingly simple ways to publish and disseminate personal or opinionated information, which can rapidly have a disastrous influence on the online reputation of some of the entities. The author focuses on the Social Web and possibilities of its integration with the Semantic Web as resource for a semi-automated tracking of online reputations using imprecise natural language terms. The inherent structure of natural language supports humans not only in communication but also in the perception of the world. Thereby fuzziness is a promising tool for transforming those human perceptions into computer artifacts. Through fuzzy grassroots ontologies, the Social Semantic Web becomes more naturally and thus can streamline online reputation management. For readers interested in the cross-over field of computer science, information systems, and social sciences, this book is an ideal source for becoming acquainted with the evolving field of fuzzy online reputation management in the Social Semantic Web area. ?

Edy Portman is a Postdoctoral Researcher at UC Berkeley, where he is working on the intersection of Human-Computer Information Retrieval, Mediamatics, and Soft Computing. Previously he studied economics, business, information systems, and computer science at various Swiss universities. During his studies Dr. Portman worked for several organizations related to these disciplines, Link Market Research Institute, Swisscom Mobile, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Ernst & Young, and the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts. He has been a Visiting Researcher at the Keio-NUS CUTE Center at the National University of Singapore.