A Pagerank-based Collaborative Filtering Recommendation Approach in Digital Libraries

Original scientific paper In the current era of big data, the explosive growth of digital resources in Digital Libraries (DLs) has led to the serious information overload problem. This trend demands personalized recommendation approaches to provide DL users with digital resources specific to their individual needs. In this paper we present a personalized digital resource recommendation approach, which combines PageRank and Collaborative Filtering (CF) techniques in a unified framework for recommending right digital resources to an active user by generating and analyzing a time-aware network of both user relationships and resource relationships from historical usage data. To address the existing issues in DL deployment, including unstable user profiles, unstable digital resource features, data sparsity and cold start problem, this work adapts the personalized PageRank algorithm to rank the time-aware resource importance for more effective CF, by searching for associative links connecting both active user and his/her initially preferred resources. We further evaluate the performance of the proposed methodology through a case study relative to the traditional CF technique operating on the same historical usage data from a DL.