Social media recommendation based on people and tags

We study personalized item recommendation within an enterprise social media application suite that includes blogs, bookmarks, communities, wikis, and shared files. Recommendations are based on two of the core elements of social media - people and tags. Relationship information among people, tags, and items, is collected and aggregated across different sources within the enterprise. Based on these aggregated relationships, the system recommends items related to people and tags that are related to the user. Each recommended item is accompanied by an explanation that includes the people and tags that led to its recommendation, as well as their relationships with the user and the item. We evaluated our recommender system through an extensive user study. Results show a significantly better interest ratio for the tag-based recommender than for the people-based recommender, and an even better performance for a combined recommender. Tags applied on the user by other people are found to be highly effective in representing that user's topics of interest.