A Collaborative Filtering Agent System for Dynamic Virtual Communities on the Web

Collaborative filtering automatically retrieves and filters documents by considering the recommendations or feedback given by other users to the documents. In this paper we describe the webCobra recommendation system for automatically recommending high-quality web documents to users with similar interests on arbitrarily narrow information domains. User-centric virtual communities consisting of members whose recommendations have been deemed to be highly relevant with respect to a particular information domain will be automatically formed. We present some preliminary results and show that virtual collaborative communities defined by webCobra are able to dynamically modify their boundaries to allow for changes in user interests. 1 Introduction Obtaining relevant, quality information on the World Wide Web is a notoriously difficult problem. The large and growing number of distributed hypermedia consisting of documents, links and indexes has made it hard to locate relevant information. To ..