WWW '05 International Workshop on Innovations in Web Infrastructure (IWI '05)
May 10, 2005, Chiba, Japan.
Emergence of Spontaneous Order Through Neighborhood Formation in Peer-to-Peer Recommender Systems
Ernesto Diaz-Aviles,
Lars Schmidt-Thieme,
Cai-Nicolas Ziegler
Abstract:
The advent of the Semantic Web necessitates paradigm shifts
away from centralized client/server architectures towards
decentralization and peer-to-peer computation, making the
existence of central authorities superfluous and even impossible. At the same time, recommender systems are gaining considerable impact in e-commerce, providing people
with recommendations that are personalized and tailored
to their very needs. These recommender systems have traditionally been deployed with stark centralized scenarios in
mind, operating in closed communities detached from their
host network’s outer perimeter. We aim at marrying these
two worlds, i.e., decentralized peer-to-peer computing and
recommender systems, in one agent-based framework. Our
architecture features an epidemic-style protocol maintaining neighborhoods of like-minded peers in a robust, self-organizing fashion. In order to demonstrate our architecture’s ability to retain scalability, robustness and to allow
for convergence towards high-quality recommendations, we
conduct offline experiments on top of the popular MovieLens
dataset.