Collaborative Document Monitoring via a Recommender System

In this paper we take a second look at agents that help users monitor URLs. More specifically, we present a system which enables the collaborative evaluation of URL content changes via a recommender agent. The recommender agent on its own helps users share URLs of interest within a community. A document monitoring agent is coupled with the recommender agent to alert members of a community when documents they are monitoring have changed. The agent provides an automized evaluation of the nature of the change. Users, however, provide the subjective evaluation and one user’s effort is often enough to inform the whole community. Based on these subjective evaluations, the recommender agent can decide which changed URLs to report to each user based on their preferences. By coupling the monitoring agent and the recommender agent, the work of monitoring URLs can be shared among many, hopefully to the benefit of all.