Creating user-adapted Websites by the use of collaborative filtering

The information globalization induced by the rapid development of the Internet and the accompanying adoption of the Web throughout the society leads to Websites which reach large audiences. The diversity of the audiences and the need of customer retention require active Websites, which expose themselves in a customized or personalized way: We call those sites User-adapted Websites. New technologies are necessary to personalize and customize content. Information filtering can be used for the discovery of important content and is therefore a key-technology for the creation of user-adapted Websites.

In this article, we focus on the application of collaborative filtering for user-adapted Websites. We studied techniques for combining and integrating content-based filtering with collaborative filtering in order to address typical problems in collaborative filtering systems and to improve the performance. Other issues which are mentioned but only lightly covered include user interface challenges. To validate our approaches we developed a prototype user-adapted Website, the Active WebMuseum, a museum Website, which exposes its collection in a personalized way by the use of collaborative filtering.