The 15th ECML PKDD Discovery Challenge centered around the recommendation of given names. Participants of the challenge implemented algorithms that were tested both offline - on data collected by the name search engine Nameling - and online within Nameling. Here, we describe both tasks in detail and discuss the publicly available datasets. We motivate and explain the chosen evaluation of the challenge, and we summarize the different approaches applied to the name recommendation tasks. Finally, we present the rankings and winners of the offline and the online phase.

An increasing number of platforms like Xively or ThingSpeak are available to manage ubiquitous sensor data enabling the Internet of Things. Strict data formats allow interoperability and informative visualizations, supporting the development of custom user applications. Yet, these strict data formats as well as the common feed-centric approach limit the flexibility of these platforms. We aim at providing a concept that supports data ranging from text-based formats like JSON to images and video footage. Furthermore, we introduce the concept of extensions, which allows to enrich existing data points with additional information, thus, taking a data point centric approach. This enables us to gain semantic and user specific context by attaching subjective data to objective values. This paper provides an overview of our architecture including concept, implementation details and present applications. We distinguish our approach from several other systems and describe two sensing applications namely AirProbe and WideNoise that were implemented for our platform.

An increasing number of platforms like Xively or ThingSpeak are available to manage ubiquitous sensor data enabling the Internet of Things. Strict data formats allow interoperability and informative visualizations, supporting the development of custom user applications. Yet, these strict data formats as well as the common feed-centric approach limit the flexibility of these platforms. We aim at providing a concept that supports data ranging from text-based formats like JSON to images and video footage. Furthermore, we introduce the concept of extensions, which allows to enrich existing data points with additional information, thus, taking a data point centric approach. This enables us to gain semantic and user specific context by attaching subjective data to objective values. This paper provides an overview of our architecture including concept, implementation details and present applications. We distinguish our approach from several other systems and describe two sensing applications namely AirProbe and WideNoise that were implemented for our platform.

The new opportunities for applying recommendation techniques within Social Web platforms and applications as well as the various new sources of information which have become available in the Web 2.0 and can be incorporated in future recommender applications are a strong driving factor in current recommender system research for various reasons:</p> <p>(1) Social systems by their definition encourage interaction between users and both online content and other users, thus generating new sources of knowledge for recommender systems. Web 2.0 users explicitly provide personal information and implicitly express preferences through their interactions with others and the system (e.g. commenting, friending, rating, etc.). These various new sources of knowledge can be leveraged to improve recommendation techniques and develop new strategies which focus on social recommendation.</p> <p>(2) New application areas for recommender systems emerge with the popularity of the Social Web. Recommenders cannot only be used to sort and filter Web 2.0 and social network information, they can also support users in the information sharing process, e.g., by recommending suitable tags during folksonomy development.</p> <p>(3) Recommender technology can assist Social Web systems through increasing adoption and participation and sustaining membership. Through targeted and timely intervention which stimulates traffic and interaction, recommender technology can play its role in sustaining the success of the Social Web.</p> <p>(4) The Social Web also presents new challenges for recommender systems, such as the complicated nature of human-to-human interaction which comes into play when recommending people and can require more interactive and richer recommender systems user interfaces.</p> <p>The technical papers appearing in these proceedings aim to explore and understand challenges and new opportunities for recommender systems in the Social Web and were selected in a formal review process by an international program committee.</p> <p>Overall, we received 13 paper submissions from 12 different countries, out of which 7 long papers and 1 short paper were selected for presentation and inclusion in the proceedings. The submitted papers addressed a variety of topics related to Social Web recommender systems from the use of microblogging data for personalization over new tag recommendation approaches to social media-based personalization of news.

The exponential growth of the social web poses challenges and new opportunities for recommender systems. The social web has turned information consumers into active contributors creating massive amounts of information. Finding relevant and interesting content at the right time and in the right context is challenging for existing recommender approaches. At the same time, social systems by their definition encourage interaction between users and both online content and other users, thus generating new sources of knowledge for recommender systems. Web 2.0 users explicitly provide personal information and implicitly express preferences through their interactions with others and the system (e.g. commenting, friending, rating, etc.). These various new sources of knowledge can be leveraged to improve recommendation techniques and develop new strategies which focus on social recommendation. The Social Web provides huge opportunities for recommender technology and in turn recommender technologies can play a part in fuelling the success of the Social Web phenomenon.</p> <p>The goal of this one day workshop was to bring together researchers and practitioners to explore, discuss, and understand challenges and new opportunities for Recommender Systems and the Social Web. The workshop consisted both of technical sessions, in which selected participants presented their results or ongoing research, as well as informal breakout sessions on more focused topics.</p> <p>Papers discussing various aspects of recommender system in the Social Web were submitted and selected for presentation and discussion in the workshop in a formal reviewing process: Case studies and novel fielded social recommender applications; Economy of community-based systems: Using recommenders to encourage users to contribute and sustain participation.; Social network and folksonomy development: Recommending friends, tags, bookmarks, blogs, music, communities etc.; Recommender systems mash-ups, Web 2.0 user interfaces, rich media recommender systems; Collaborative knowledge authoring, collective intelligence; Recommender applications involving users or groups directly in the recommendation process; Exploiting folksonomies, social network information, interaction, user context and communities or groups for recommendations; Trust and reputation aware social recommendations; Semantic Web recommender systems, use of ontologies or microformats; Empirical evaluation of social recommender techniques, success and failure measures</p> <p>Full workshop details are available at http://www.dcs.warwick.ac.uk/~ssanand/RSWeb11/index.htm

The purpose of Web mining is to develop methods and systems for discovering models of objects and processes on the World Wide Web and for web-based systems that show adaptive performance. Web Mining integrates three parent areas: Data Mining (we use this term here also for the closely related areas of Machine Learning and Knowledge Discovery), Internet technology and World Wide Web, and for the more recent Semantic Web. The World Wide Web has made an enormous amount of information electronically accessible. The use of email, news and markup languages like HTML allow users to publish and read documents at a world-wide scale and to communicate via chat connections, including information in the form of images and voice records. The HTTP protocol that enables access to documents over the network via Web browsers created an immense improvement in communication and access to information. For some years these possibilities were used mostly in the scientific world but recent years have seen an immense growth in popularity, supported by the wide availability of computers and broadband communication. The use of the internet for other tasks than finding information and direct communication is increasing, as can be seen from the interest in ldquoe-activitiesrdquo such as e-commerce, e-learning, e-government, e-science.