receteame.com: a Persuasive Social Recommendation System

Abstract

Over the last few years, the emergence of social networks has changed the main activities performed by users on the Internet, going from a mere search and navigation over stored information to a direct interaction with other users. Users have evolved from being consumers of information to real producers (what is known as the transition from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0). Due to the increasing number of heterogeneous users and information that is generated, their unpredictable behavior and the high dynamism of the network structure, users have to cope with a high degree of uncertainty when choosing who to interact to or what information to consume [1]. In order to deal with this uncertainty, users require tools that help them to make decisions regarding their activities within the network. Recommendation systems [2] [3], which are systems that provide effective recommendations about what action users can take or what information they can consume, can be effective tools for performing theses decision-support tasks. In this paper, we present a persuasive social recommendation system for recipe recommendation in a social network (called receteame.com). The proposed system allows the recommendation of recipes taking into account aspects like persuasion, similarity, friendship, trust, reputation and user food tastes.