A Semi-Supervised Algorithm to Manage Communities of Interests

The Galilei Framework

The main purpose of the GALILEI Framework² is to propose an integrated model to manage digital information (mostly electronic documents). A complete description of the framework is outside the scope of this chapter, but an important feature is to identify users' interests as precisely as possible and consequently grouping them. The approach integrated in the GALILEI Framework, and called social browsing, proposes (a) to model the multiple interests of a given user as separate profiles (each profile corresponds to a particular interest), (b) to automatically compute the descriptions of these profiles based on documents assessments done by the corresponding users and (c) to group these profiles into communities of interests (one user belonging to as many communities as the number of his or her profiles).

In order to compute the profiles descriptions, the GALILEI framework uses the relevance assessments of documents read by the users for a particular profile³ and the analysis of their content (Technical Overview describes the document analysis process). Currently, three different assessments have been adopted:

• 1.

  The document is relevant. A Web page about the Beatles is, for example, a relevant document for a “Beatles profile” representing a fan of this group.

• 2.

  The document is partially relevant (fuzzy relevant), but does not fall exactly within the scope of the domain. A Web page about the Wings may be considered by a “Beatles profile” as fuzzy relevant since there are connections between the two groups (Paul McCartney plays in both).

• 3.

  The document is outside the scope of the interest (irrelevant). The home page of Steve Jobs is (probably) completely irrelevant for a “Beatles profile” (Apple, the name of the company he founded, is not related with the record label of the Beatles while having the same name).