A recommender system enhanced through a social networking site

Abstract

For humans it is quite natural to advise one another in the form of recommendations. This has evolved with the use of computers to a point where a system is built to provide these recommendations. The Internet makes it possible for such recommender systems to be used in ways that were not possible before. With the rise of Web 2.0 and social networking sites such systems have become essential to anyone who has more than the occasional interaction with the Internet. This project aims to merge these two areas by building a recommender system of significant accuracy within the context of a domain specific social network. This study focuses on the process of developing an online application composed of a frontend and a backend, where the frontend contains various social networking features as well as a simple and seamless way for the user to interact with the backend. The backend consists predominantly of the recommender system which uses data harvested by the frontend to generate a set of recommendations for the user, which are returned through the frontend.