Collaborative and Usage-Driven Evolution of Personal Ontologies

Large information repositories as digital libraries, online shops, etc. rely on a taxonomy of the objects under consideration to structure the vast contents and facilitate browsing and searching (e.g., ACM topic classification for computer science literature, Amazon product taxonomy, etc.). As in heterogenous communities users typically will use different parts of such an ontology with varying intensity, customization and personalization of the ontologies is desirable. Of particular interest for supporting users during the personalization are collaborative filtering systems which can produce personal recommendations by computing the similarity between own preferences and the one of other people. In this paper we adapt a collaborative filtering recommender system to assist users in the management and evolution of their personal ontology by providing detailed suggestions of ontology changes. Such a system has been implemented in the context of Bibster, a peer-to-peer based personal bibliography management tool. Finally, we report on an experiment with the Bibster community that shows the performance improvements over non-personalized recommendations.