Incentivized provision of metadata, semantic reasoning and time-driven filtering: Making a puzzle of personalized e-commerce

e-Commerce recommender systems select potentially interesting products for users by looking at their purchase histories and preferences. In order to compare the available products against those included in the user’s profile, semantics-based recommendation strategies consider metadata annotations that describe their main attributes. Besides, to ensure successful suggestions of products, these strategies adapt the recommendations as the user’s preferences evolve over time. Traditional approaches face two limitations related to the aforementioned features. First, product providers are not typically willing to take on the tedious task of annotating accurately a huge diversity of commercial items, thus leading to a substantial impoverishment of the personalization quality. Second, the adaptation process of the recommendations misses the time elapsed since the user has bought an item, which is an essential parameter that affects differently to each purchased product. This results in some pointless recommendations, e.g. including regularly items that the users are only willing to buy sporadically. In order to fight both limitations, we propose a personalized e-commerce system with two main features. On the one hand, we incentivize the users to provide high-quality metadata for commercial products; on the other, we explore a strategy that offers time-aware recommendations by combining semantic reasoning about these annotations with item-specific time functions. The synergetic effects derived from this combination lead to suggestions adapted to the particular needs of the users at any time. This approach has been experimentally validated with a set of users who accessed our personalized e-commerce system through a range of fixed and handheld consumer devices.