Integrating user modeling approaches into a framework for recommender agents

Abstract

PurposeRecommender agents are used to make recommendations of interesting items in a wide variety of application domains, such as web page recommendation, music, e‐commerce, movie recommendation, tourism, restaurant recommendation, among others. Despite the various and different domains in which recommender agents are used and the variety of approaches they use to represent user interests and make recommendations, there is some functionality that is common to all of them, such as user model management and recommendation of interesting items. This paper aims at generalizing these common behaviors into a framework that enables developers to reuse recommender agents' main characteristics in their own developments.Design/methodology/approachThis work presents a framework for recommendation that provides the control structures, the data structures and a set of algorithms and metrics for different recommendation methods. The proposed framework acts as the base design for recommender agents or applications that want to add the already modeled and implemented capabilities to their own functionality. In contrast with other proposals, this framework is designed to enable the integration of diverse user models, such as demographic, content‐based and item‐based. In addition to the different implementations provided for these components, new algorithms and user model representations can be easily added to the proposed approach. Thus, personal agents originally designed to assist a single user can reuse the behavior implemented in the framework to expand their recommendation strategies.FindingsThe paper describes three different recommender agents built by materializing the proposed framework: a movie recommender agent, a tourism recommender agent, and a web page recommender agent. Each agent uses a different recommendation approach. PersonalSearcher, an agent originally designed to suggest interesting web pages to a user, was extended to collaboratively assist a group of users using content‐based algorithms. MovieRecommender recommends interesting movies using an item‐based approach and Traveller suggests holiday packages using demographic user models. Findings encountered during the development of these agents and their empirical evaluation are described here.Originality/valueThe advantages of the proposed framework are twofold. On the one hand, the functionality provided by the framework enables the development of recommender agents without the need for implementing its whole set of capabilities from scratch. The main processes and data structures of recommender agents are already implemented. On the other hand, already existing agents can be enhanced by incorporating the functionality provided by the recommendation framework in order to act collaboratively.