SPGProfile: Speak Group Profile

In this paper, we propose an XML-based recommender system, called SPGProfile. It is a type of collaborative information filtering system. SPGProfile uses ontology-driven social networks, where nodes represent social groups. A social group is an entity that defines a group based on demographic, ethnic, cultural, religious, age, or other characteristics. In the SPGProfile framework, query results are filtered and ranked based on the preferences of the social groups to which the user belongs. If the user belongs to social group Gx, results will be filtered based on the preferences of Gx and the preferences of each ancestor social group of Gx in the social network. SPGProfile can be used for various practical applications, such as Internet or other businesses that market preference-driven products. In the ontology, the preferences of a social group are identified from either: (1) the preferences of its member users or (2) from published studies about the social group. We describe and experimentally compare these two approaches. We also experimentally evaluate the search effectiveness and efficiency of SPGProfile and compare it to two existing search engines.