What is Spreading Activation Techniques

The so-called recommender systems have become assistance tools indispensable to the users in domains where the information overload hampers manual search processes. In literature, diverse personalization paradigms have been proposed to match automatically the preferences of each user (which are previously modelled in personal profiles) against the available items. All these paradigms are laid down on a common substratum that uses syntactic matching techniques, which greatly limit the quality of the offered recommendations due to their inflexible nature. To fight these limitations, this chapter explores a novel approach based on reasoning about the semantics of both the users’ preferences and considered items, by resorting to less rigid inference mechanisms borrowed from the Semantic Web.