Context-Aware Recommender Systems

This article explores how contextual information can be used to create intelligent and useful recommender systems. It provides an overview of the multifaceted notion of context, discusses several approaches for incorporating contextual information in the recommendation process, and illustrates the usage of such approaches in several application areas where different types of contexts are exploited. The article concludes by discussing the challenges and future research directions for context-aware recommender systems. As additional observations are made about users' preferences, the user models are extended, and the full collection of user preferences is used to generate recommendations or make predictions. This approach, therefore, ignores the notion of "situated actions" (Suchman 1987), the fact that users interact with the system within a particular "context" and that preferences for items within one context may be different from those in another context.