A recommender system based on tag and time information for social tagging systems

Recently, social tagging has become increasingly prevalent on the Internet, which provides an effective way for users to organize, manage, share and search for various kinds of resources. These tagging systems offer lots of useful information, such as tag, an expression of user's preference towards a certain resource; time, a denotation of user's interests drift. As information explosion, it is necessary to recommend resources that a user might like. Since collaborative filtering (CF) is aimed to provide personalized services, how to integrate tag and time information in CF to provide better personalized recommendations for social tagging systems becomes a challenging task. In this paper, we investigate the importance and usefulness of tag and time information when predicting users' preference and examine how to exploit such information to build an effective resource-recommendation model. We design a recommender system to realize our computational approach. Also, we show empirically using data from a real-world dataset that tag and time information can well express users' taste and we also show that better performances can be achieved if such information is integrated into CF. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.