Personalized Recommender System for Digital Libraries

Abstract

The huge amount of information available online has given rise to personalization and filtering systems. Recommender systems (RS) constitute a specific type of information filtering technique that present items according to user's interests. In this research, a web-based personalized recommender system capable of providing learners with books that suit their reading abilities was developed. Content-based filtering (CBF) was used to analyze learners' reading abilities while books that are found suitable to learners are recommended with fuzzy matching techniques. The yokefellow cold-start problem inherent to CBF is assuaged by cold start engine. An experimental study was carried out on a database of 10000 books from different categories of computing studies. The outcome tracked over a period of eight months shows that the proposed system induces greater user satisfaction and this attests users' desirability of the system.