2003-08-27

Automatically Sharing Web Experiences through a Hyperdocument Recommender
System
http://www.ht03.org/papers/pdfs/6.pdf


Abstract from http://www.ht03.org/papers/

"As an approach that applies not only to the support user navigation on the
web, recommender systems have been built to assist and augment the natural
social process of asking for recommendations from other people. In a typical
recommender system, people provide recommendations as inputs, which the system
aggregates and directs to appropriate recipients. In some cases, the primary
transformation is in the aggregation; in others the value of the system lies in
its ability to make good matches between the recommenders and those seeking
recommendations. In this paper we discuss architectural and design features of
WebMemex, a system that (a) provides recommended information based on capturing
the history of navigation from a list of people well-known to the users ---
including the users themselves, (b) allows the user to have access from any
networked machine, (c) demands user authentication to access the repository of
recommendations, and (d) allows the user to specify when capturing of her
history should be performed."


* INTRODUCTION

Two 'finding' problems:
- on the www
	. search engines require users to formulate appropriate queries
	. local browsing context can help refine queries (good thing)
- previous information
	. bookmarks: tied to browsers, machines

[in a sense these are problems that weblogs are trying to solve, cf weblog as
"web filter", weblog as "outboard brain"]

Recommender systems help users when searching:
. augment
. users are better at recognising good results than machines

* WEBMEMEX

. captures users www activity, continuously
. this is shared with people the user knows, but the capture can be explicitly
disabled [the physics of these systems change the game theory landscape and
will unfold into a different set of ethics. what sort of ethics will come from
this?]

it's architected as a web proxy which captures web pages, linking them in an
internal database. related pages are presented back to the user in a separate
window. the proxy deals with authentication so it knows it's you: not tied to a
single machine.

for groups there are general recommendations included in the list presented
back to each user. [sharing is two-way at the moment. it would be interesting
to be able to allow your stuff to be shared, but not be worried about who's
sharing it. a publish, broadcast model. although, having subscribers and your
browsing being influenced by the general browsing of your subscribers, that
would be interesting.]

* RELATED WORK

. SIFT
	- users provide keywords and profiles
. Letizia, WebWatcher, Margin Notes, QuickStep
	- infer user prefs from user-browsing behaviour
. MEMOIR
	- aims at finding users, not documents
	- mines user's trails (treated as first-class objects)
. WebMemex
	- recommendations from trusted users
	- navigation history
	- required proper filtering for good results


A few notes:
- There's a reference to Englebart/Bush "Collective IQ"
- for future work, what can they do with the data now? It's been used by groups
(2 groups of 4 people) for a whole semester. There's something valuable in
there?
- it's available for download, information on the paper


Questions:
- interesting one. A url that's recommended is likely to be a short distance
away from where you are currently, have you done any measurement of how far
away urls tend to be? Answer: no, but they need more data. [It's an interesting
point. How often are people really close to what they'd like to see, but don't
stumble across it?]

==
Rumblings:


Old notes on a similar topic...

2003-01-14

Personal web proxy links


Some related links on personal web proxies:

http://www.dataficial.com/projects/clickstream/
http://mestream.sourceforge.net/
http://matt.griffith.com/weblog/stories/2002/12/22/
jogMyPersonalGoogleampWaybackMachine.html
http://www.decafbad.com/news_archives/000090.phtml
http://www.decafbad.com/twiki/bin/view/Main/PersonalServer
http://www.decafbad.com/twiki/bin/view/Main/PersonalWebProxy

And as far as building one goes, will this help?
http://www.macmegasite.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=597
(local Apache proxy. Grab what goes by it?)


2003-03-12

http://www.decafbad.com/twiki/bin/view/Main/AgentFrank

And lots linked from there (including Aaron Schwartz' one)