Recommending Biomedical Resources: A Fuzzy Linguistic Approach Based on Semantic Web

One of the key issues in dynamic research areas, such as that of biomedical sciences, is the devel-opment of tools capable to retrieve and provide users relevant resources from large repositories according to their information needs. In this paper, we present a filtering and recommender system that applies Semantic Web technologies and fuzzy linguistic modeling techniques to provide users valuable information about resources that fit their interests. To carry out the recommendation process, we have defined three software agents (interface, task, and information agents) that are distributed in a five level hierarchical architecture. The system is also capable of to deal with incomplete information to define enriched user profiles and, therefore, soften the problem of cold start. A simple evaluation has been carried out, and the experimental outcomes reveal a reasonable good performance of the system in terms of precision and recall. C © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 1