SocialFan: Integrating Social Networks Into Recommender Systems

Abstract

Social systems by their definition encourage interaction between users and both on-line content and other users thus generating new sources of knowledge that is valuable for recommender systems. In this paper we deal with the situation of having a recommender system where, even if a social structure implicitly exist, its users are not explicitly connected through a social network. We describe SocialFan, a domain independent tool that allows defining and integrating the social network infrastructure to capture and use the social knowledge into an existing recommender system.