(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.
(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.
(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.
(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.
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.
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.}, address = {New York, NY, USA}, author = {Mobasher, Bamshad and Jannach, Dietmar and Geyer, Werner and Hotho, Andreas}, interhash = {4a591caf39ca41da55a94a37c8c47074}, intrahash = {354947709c23c90b18dae862c46b2761}, isbn = {978-1-4503-1638-5}, location = {Dublin, Ireland}, note = 609126, publisher = {ACM}, title = {RSWeb '12: Proceedings of the 4th ACM RecSys workshop on Recommender systems and the social web}, year = 2012 } @inproceedings{Freyne:2011:WRS:2043932.2044014, abstract = {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.
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.
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
Full workshop details are available at http://www.dcs.warwick.ac.uk/~ssanand/RSWeb11/index.htm}, acmid = {2044014}, address = {New York, NY, USA}, author = {Freyne, Jill and Anand, Sarabjot Singh and Guy, Ido and Hotho, Andreas}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the fifth ACM conference on Recommender systems}, doi = {10.1145/2043932.2044014}, interhash = {6171f01a8f8cd063ec257cb4809801a6}, intrahash = {11fe6dd3da33f0aa0a40c998e5193ab8}, isbn = {978-1-4503-0683-6}, location = {Chicago, Illinois, USA}, numpages = {2}, pages = {383--384}, publisher = {ACM}, series = {RecSys '11}, title = {3rd workshop on recommender systems and the social web}, url = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2043932.2044014}, year = 2011 } @book{balbymarinho2012recommender, abstract = {Social Tagging Systems are web applications in which users upload resources (e.g., bookmarks, videos, photos, etc.) and annotate it with a list of freely chosen keywords called tags. This is a grassroots approach to organize a site and help users to find the resources they are interested in. Social tagging systems are open and inherently social; features that have been proven to encourage participation. However, with the large popularity of these systems and the increasing amount of user-contributed content, information overload rapidly becomes an issue. Recommender Systems are well known applications for increasing the level of relevant content over the “noise” that continuously grows as more and more content becomes available online. In social tagging systems, however, we face new challenges. While in classic recommender systems the mode of recommendation is basically the resource, in social tagging systems there are three possible modes of recommendation: users, resources, or tags. Therefore suitable methods that properly exploit the different dimensions of social tagging systems data are needed. In this book, we survey the most recent and state-of-the-art work about a whole new generation of recommender systems built to serve social tagging systems. The book is divided into self-contained chapters covering the background material on social tagging systems and recommender systems to the more advanced techniques like the ones based on tensor factorization and graph-based models.}, author = {Balby Marinho, L. and Hotho, A. and Jäschke, R. and Nanopoulos, A. and Rendle, S. and Schmidt-Thieme, L. and Stumme, G. and Symeonidis, P.}, interhash = {0bb7f0588cd690d67cc73e219a3a24fa}, intrahash = {87d6883ebd98e8810be45d7e7e4ade96}, isbn = {978-1-4614-1893-1}, month = feb, publisher = {Springer}, series = {SpringerBriefs in Electrical and Computer Engineering}, title = {Recommender Systems for Social Tagging Systems}, url = {http://www.springer.com/computer/database+management+%26+information+retrieval/book/978-1-4614-1893-1}, year = 2012 } @incollection{jaeschke2012challenges, abstract = {Originally introduced by social bookmarking systems, collaborative tagging, or social tagging, has been widely adopted by many web-based systems like wikis, e-commerce platforms, or social networks. Collaborative tagging systems allow users to annotate resources using freely chosen keywords, so called tags . Those tags help users in finding/retrieving resources, discovering new resources, and navigating through the system. The process of tagging resources is laborious. Therefore, most systems support their users by tag recommender components that recommend tags in a personalized way. The Discovery Challenges 2008 and 2009 of the European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (ECML PKDD) tackled the problem of tag recommendations in collaborative tagging systems. Researchers were invited to test their methods in a competition on datasets from the social bookmark and publication sharing system BibSonomy. Moreover, the 2009 challenge included an online task where the recommender systems were integrated into BibSonomy and provided recommendations in real time. In this chapter we review, evaluate and summarize the submissions to the two Discovery Challenges and thus lay the groundwork for continuing research in this area.}, address = {Berlin/Heidelberg}, affiliation = {Knowledge & Data Engineering Group, University of Kassel, Wilhelmshöher Allee 73, 34121 Kassel, Germany}, author = {Jäschke, Robert and Hotho, Andreas and Mitzlaff, Folke and Stumme, Gerd}, booktitle = {Recommender Systems for the Social Web}, doi = {10.1007/978-3-642-25694-3_3}, editor = {Pazos Arias, José J. and Fernández Vilas, Ana and Díaz Redondo, Rebeca P.}, interhash = {75b1a6f54ef54d0126d0616b5bf77563}, intrahash = {7d41d332cccc3e7ba8e7dadfb7996337}, isbn = {978-3-642-25694-3}, pages = {65--87}, publisher = {Springer}, series = {Intelligent Systems Reference Library}, title = {Challenges in Tag Recommendations for Collaborative Tagging Systems}, url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-25694-3_3}, volume = 32, year = 2012 } @article{burke2011recommendation, abstract = {Recommender systems are a means of personalizing the presentation of information to ensure that users see the items most relevant to them. The social web has added new dimensions to the way people interact on the Internet, placing the emphasis on user-generated content. Users in social networks create photos, videos and other artifacts, collaborate with other users, socialize with their friends and share their opinions online. This outpouring of material has brought increased attention to recommender systems, as a means of managing this vast universe of content. At the same time, the diversity and complexity of the data has meant new challenges for researchers in recommendation. This article describes the nature of recommendation research in social web applications and provides some illustrative examples of current research directions and techniques. It is difficult to overstate the impact of the social web. This new breed of social applications is reshaping nearly every human activity from the way people watch movies to how they overthrow governments. Facebook allows its members to maintain friendships whether they live next door or on another continent. With Twitter, users from celebrities to ordinary folks can launch their 140 character messages out to a diverse horde of ‘‘followers.” Flickr and YouTube users upload their personal media to share with the world, while Wikipedia editors collaborate on the world’s largest encyclopedia.}, author = {Burke, Robin and Gemmell, Jonathan and Hotho, Andreas and Jäschke, Robert}, interhash = {3089ca25de28ef0bc80bcdebd375a6f9}, intrahash = {41dbb2c9f71440c9aa402f8966117979}, journal = {AI Magazine}, number = 3, pages = {46--56}, publisher = {Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence}, title = {Recommendation in the Social Web}, url = {http://www.aaai.org/ojs/index.php/aimagazine/article/view/2373}, volume = 32, year = 2011 }