Collaborative Web search based on user interest similarity

Abstract

The motivation behind personal information agents resides in the enormous amount of information available on the Web, which has created a pressing need for effective personalized techniques. In order to assists Web search these agents rely on user profiles modeling information preferences, interests and habits that help to contextualize user queries. In communities of people with similar interests, collaboration among agents fosters knowledge sharing and, consequently, potentially improves the results of individual agents by taking advantage of the knowledge acquired by other agents. In this paper, we propose an agent-based recommender system for supporting collaborative Web search in groups of users with partial similarity of interests. Empirical evaluation showed that the interaction among personal agents increases the performance of the overall recommender system, demonstrating the potential of the approach to reduce the burden of finding information on the Web.

Publication
International Journal of Cooperative Information Systems