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Abstract : |
For the past two years, we have been investigating the use of recommender systems as a technology in support of knowledge sharing in organizations. Recommender systems are a way of extending the natural process of recommendation by word-of-mouth to networked groups of people. They are able to provide personalized recommendations that take into account similarities between people based on their user profiles. The community around recommender systems that has emerged in the past five or so years has focused on methods for constructing and learning user profiles, the exploration and testing of various recommendation algorithms, and the design of user interfaces, with applications primarily in the domains of electronic commerce and leisure/entertainment. Thus far, we have focused our research in two areas: adapting recommendation algorithms and user profile construction methods to take into account prior information regarding the existing organizational social network; and addressing the incentive issues surrounding the use of a recommender system for knowledge sharing in an organization. In this paper, we describe principally the incentive issues that we have identified and how we have attempted to alleviate them. We also report and analyze results from an internal year-long trial of our recommender tool, the Knowledge Pump., |
