WWW/Internet - Portal do Software Público Brasileiro

IADIS International Conference WWW/Internet 2010A RECOMMENDER SYSTEM FOR E-LEARNINGLara Cini, Matthew Montebello and Vanessa CamilleriDepartment of Intelligent Computer Systems, University of Malta, Malta.ABSTRACTE-learning plays an important role in today’s world. It provides people with the possibility of learning at their own pace,which is of a great advantage (Rosenberg, 2006). However, people are finding increasingly difficult to find relevantcontent from the Web because its volume is drastically increasing in an unstructured manner. This paper takes a look at asystem which aids learners throughout their learning process by recommending learning resources which match theirinterest or even other learners who share common interests. The integration of the hierarchic description of conceptsunder which resources fall and that of a social network is fundamental in the proposed system. This paper takes a look atthe most important parts of a project bearing the same name, and is essentially a summary of it.KEYWORDSTagging, Ontologies, eLearning1. INTRODUCTIONInformation stored on the web is not structured. Rather, if one is interested in a subject, one is allowed to putup a website about the matter to which other websites can be linked. With no regulatory body which keepstrack of data proliferating on the web it becomes tedious for a viewer to filter out content which one wouldhave already encountered from content which is new (to the viewer).Nevertheless, the World Wide Web is a place whose wealth of information is comparable to no other. Itwould be desirable to aid a user in viewing content which is relevant to him. The approach that this paperdeals with involves the usage of online social networks. It employs different aspects that such a networkprovides for providing a user with relevant information.This paper is divided into sections. In the next section, an overview of the background literature includingsimilar recommender systems and technologies available for achieving the goal of the project are defined.The following section gives an in-depth analysis and design of the proposed system which leads to the actualsystem implementation. In section 6, the results obtained from the evaluation of the entire system arediscussed.2. BACKGROUND2.1 Social NetworksThere are numerous existing bodies of literature which deal with the understanding of how social networksfunction and the tools for the provision of recommendation algorithms.A Social Network (Weaver, et al., 2008) is composed of a number of users, referred to as learners,connected together with the aim of sharing learning material. Users annotate resources by using tags.Resources include articles, reports, videos or any other content found on the web while tags refer to the termsused to define a particular resource. The purpose of Social Tagging is to classify information which makes iteasier for users to find information.377