Visualizing and Exploring Information Spaces

The previous chapters showed that behavior-based systems play a major role within the variety of recommender systems. The general interface approach of these systems is to present a list of products that are either related to the customer’s purchase (or inspection) history or have been co-purchased by other customers together with the product of current interest. This interface has two main advantages: it is easily understood and easily integrated by HTML lists or tables into the shop website. The large drawback of this presentation is that the customer is completely unaware of the overall connections between the products. Conceptually, behavior-based recommendations are the weighted edges of a digraph with the products as nodes.