2003-08-29

Common web paths in group adaptive system
http://www.ht03.org/papers/pdfs/36.pdf

Abstract from http://www.ht03.org/papers/
"In this paper we describe the how we use users' accesses and interactions on
pages to discover and recommend relevant Common Paths to a group of users. We
collect data using a social navigation environment GAS (Group Adaptive System)
we developed [1] and we are currently integrating the 'Common Path' navigation
tool in the user interface. The goal is to use the Common Path of a subset of
users in the system as a recommendation to a user (not in the subset)"


presentation:
. cooperation on the www
. GAS: a group adaptive system
. common web pahts in GAS


web is not a social place...
- everyone navigates in isolation
	- wikis etc are a good attempt at social stuff, but not navigation
- absolutely different from the real life
- we want a social nav place where pages can be scored, sent messages about,
annotated by a group of people
- ...where we can get knowledge of whole group

other systems:
- GroupLens
- Fab (collab filtering for movies and web)
- Swiki (server-side annotation)
- Babbles (chat annotation/awareness)

GAS:
- share effort of finding stuff
- access common info space

they used the group interest to suggest/recommend stuff to the group, using the
Kleinberg algorithm (HITS) [HITS has come up a lot. i should learn about the
*information retrieval* field]

GAS is implemented as a web proxy.


how to define common paths:
* longest common subsequence (LCS) appears too restrictive
	- if the navigations are close but not identical, eg
		. abcdefg vs axbyczdj
* LCSs do not capture personal nature of navigation, train of thought etc
* "Levenshtein distance" -- allow a bounded number of mismatches [oooh!]

common paths are interesting because similarities should common interest, but
also:
- same reaction to information on the page
- same order to access information

applications:
- identify common paths and suggest next steps
- characterise the group and let users compare themselves to that