Development of a group recommender application in a Social Network

In today’s society, recommendations are becoming increasingly important. With the advent of the Social Web and the growing popularity of Social Networks, where users explicitly provide personal information and interact with others and the system, it is becoming clear that the key for the success of recommendations is to develop new strategies which focus on social recommendations leveraged by these new sources of knowledge. In our work, we focus on group recommender systems. These systems traditionally suffer from a number of shortcomings that hamper their effectiveness. In this paper we continue our research, that focuses on improving the overall quality of group recommendations through the addition of social knowledge to existing recommendation strategies. To do so, we use the information stored in Social Networks to elicit social factors following two approaches: the cognitive modeling approach, that studies how people’s way of thinking predisposes their actions; and the social approach, that studies how people’s relationships predispose their actions. We show the value of using models of social cognition extracted from Social Networks in group recommender systems through the instantiation of our model into a real-life Facebook movie recommender application.