Recommendation Based Discovery of Dynamic Virtual Communities

Recommendation systems have been a popular topic of research ever since the ubiquity of the web made it clear that people of hugely varying backgrounds would be able to access and query the same underlying data. Content-based [1] and collaborative filtering [1], [2] algorithms are usually used to form recommendations, while additional hybrid techniques have been proposed as well. We introduce an alternative way of building user profiles based on both explicit and implicit ratings, as well as, profile-based recommendation algorithms. We advocate the use of such algorithms in order to automate the discovery of dynamic, virtual communities. As an application of the proposed techniques, we implemented MRS, a web-based information system that provides recommendations for cinema movies. The interested reader is strongly encouraged to visit the web site (http://diat11.csd.uoc.gr) to obtain a more detailed view.