Personalisation of social web services in the enterprise using spreading activation for multi-source, cross-domain recommendations

Existing personalisation approaches, such as collaborative filtering or content based recommendations, are highly dependent on the domain and/or the source of the data. Therefore, there is a need for more accurate means to capture and model the interests of the user across domains, and to interlink them in a semantically-enhanced interest graph. We propose a new approach for multi-source, cross-genre recommendations that can exploit the heterogeneous nature of user profile data, which has been aggregated from multiple personalised web services, such as blogs, wikis and microblogs. Our approach is based on the Spreading Activation model that exploits intrinsic links between entities across a number of data sources. The proposed method is highly customizable and applicable both to generic and specific recommendation scenarios and use cases. With the growing number of Social Web applications in the enterprise (blogs, wikis, micro blogging, etc.), it becomes difficult for knowledge workers to avoid content overload and to quickly identify relevant people, communities and information. We demonstrate the application of our approach in an industrial use case that involves recommendation of social semantic data across multiple services in a distributed collaborative environment.