The recommendation of products, content and services cannot be considered newly born, although its widespread application is still in full swing. While its growing success in numerous sectors, the progress of the Social Web has revolutionized the architecture of participation and relationship in the Web, making it necessary to restate recommendation and reconciling it with "Collaborative Tagging," as the popularization of authoring in the Web, and "Social Networking," as the translation of personal relationships to the Web. Precisely, the convergence of recommendation with the above "Social Web" pillars is what motivates this book, which has collected contributions from well-known experts in the academy and the industry to provide a broader view of the problems that "Social Recommenders" might face with. If recommender systems have proven their key role in facilitating the user access to resources on the Web, when sharing resources has become social, it is natural for recommendation strategies in the Social Web era take into account the users' point of view and the relationships among users to calculate their predictions. This book aims to help readers to discover and understand the interplay among legal issues such as privacy; technical aspects such as interoperability and scalability; and social aspects such as the influence of affinity, trust, reputation and likeness, when the goal is to offer recommendations that are truly useful to both the user and the provider."

The recommendation of products, content and services cannot be considered newly born, although its widespread application is still in full swing. While its growing success in numerous sectors, the progress of the Social Web has revolutionized the architecture of participation and relationship in the Web, making it necessary to restate recommendation and reconciling it with Collaborative Tagging, as the popularization of authoring in the Web, and Social Networking, as the translation of personal relationships to the Web. Precisely, the convergence of recommendation with the above Social Web pillars is what motivates this book, which has collected contributions from well-known experts in the academy and the industry to provide a broader view of the problems that Social Recommenders might face with. If recommender systems have proven their key role in facilitating the user access to resources on the Web, when sharing resources has become social, it is natural for recommendation strategies in the Social Web era take into account the users' point of view and the relationships among users to calculate their predictions. This book aims to help readers to discover and understand the interplay among legal issues such as privacy; technical aspects such as interoperability and scalability; and social aspects such as the influence of affinity, trust, reputation and likeness, when the goal is to offer recommendations that are truly useful to both the user and the provider.

The advance to the so-called Information Society is leading to an enormous growth in the amount of multimedia information available. The success or failure of the information technologies depends ultimately on the services provided to the final user, and an unmanageable amount of information can render them useless. To tackle this problem, personalisation techniques are being developed to help consumers find the specific contents that match their preferences, interests, likings, and needs. Taking into account the strategic role of personalisation in the future of the information technologies, this book provides a technical overview of the current research and development trends, considering the wide range of application areas (education, government, commerce, news, entertainment,...) and the multiple devices (personal computers, digital TV set-top boxes, mobile phones, PDAs, watches, GPS navigators, etc., they embrace. The book comprises chapters authored by outstanding authors from academic institutions, describing their particular works in an extensive and self-contained manner, though with a global approach that will allow the readers to easily understand the core commonalities between the different algorithms, techniques, applications, and technologic platforms.