Iacopo Vagliano

Context-aware Recommender Systems aim to provide users with the most adequate recommendations for their current situation. However, an exact context obtained from a user could be too specific and may not have enough data for accurate rating prediction. This is known as the data sparsity problem. Moreover, often user preference representation depends on the domain or the specific recommendation approach used. Therefore, a big effort is required to change the method used. In this paper, we present a new approach for contextual pre-filtering (i.e. using the current context to select a relevant subset of data). Our approach can be used with existing recommendation algorithms. It is based on two ontologies: Recommender System Context ontology, which represents the context, and Contextual Ontological User Profile ontology, which represents user preferences. We evaluated our approach through an offline study which showed that when used with well-known recommendation algorithms it can significantly improve the accuracy of prediction.

ABSTRACT In this paper, we present an approach to exploit Linked Data in Smart Spaces, doing more than just using RDF to represent informa- tion. In particular, we rely on knowledge stored in DBpedia1, a dataset in the Web of Data. We also provide a platform to implement such an approach and a eTourism use case, both developed in collaboration with a mobile operator. Finally, we provide also a performance evaluation of the main component of the platform.

The Web's evolution into a Semantic Web and the continuous increase in the amount of data published as linked data open up new opportunities for annotation and categorization systems to reuse these data as semantic knowledge bases. Accordingly, information extraction systems use linked data to exploit semantic knowledge bases, which can be interconnected and structured to increase the precision and recall of annotation and categorization mechanisms. TellMeFirst classifies and enriches textual documents written in English and Italian. Although various works present solutions for text annotation and classification, this article describes and studies the use case of a telecommunications operator that has adopted TellMeFirst to add value to two services available to its users: FriendTV and Society.

Recommender systems (RS) are software tools that use analytic technologies to suggest different items of interest to an end user. Linked Data is a set of best practices for publishing and connecting structured data on the Web. This paper presents a systematic literature review to summarize the state of the art in RS that use structured data published as Linked Data for providing recommendations of items from diverse domains. It considers the most relevant research problems addressed and classifies RS according to how Linked Data have been used to provide recommendations. Furthermore, it analyzes contributions, limitations, application domains, evaluation techniques, and directions proposed for future research. We found that there are still many open challenges with regard to RS based on Linked Data in order to be efficient for real applications. The main ones are personalization of recommendations, use of more datasets considering the heterogeneity introduced, creation of new hybrid RS for adding information, definition of more advanced similarity measures that take into account the large amount of data in Linked Data datasets, and implementation of testbeds to study evaluation techniques and to assess the accuracy scalability and computational complexity of RS. Available at: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/cpe.3449/abstract

ABSTRACT In this paper, we present an approach to exploit Linked Data in Smart Spaces, doing more than just using RDF to represent informa- tion. In particular, we rely on knowledge stored in DBpedia1, a dataset in the Web of Data. We also provide a platform to implement such an approach and a eTourism use case, both developed in collaboration with a mobile operator. Finally, we provide also a performance evaluation of the main component of the platform.

The Web of Data is an interconnected global dataspace in which discovering resources related to a given resource and recommend relevant ones is still an open research area. This work describes a new recommendation algorithm based on structured data published on the Web (Linked Data). The algorithm exploits existing relationships between resources by dynamically analyzing both the categories to which they belong to and their explicit references to other resources. A user study conducted to evaluate the algorithm showed that our algorithm provides more novel recommendations than other state-of-the-art algorithms and keeps a satisfying prediction accuracy. The algorithm has been applied in a mobile application to recommend movies by relying on DBpedia (the Linked Data version of Wikipedia), although it could be applied to other datasets on the Web of Data.