We present an overview of the latest approaches to using ontologies in recommender systems and our work on the problem of recommending on-line academic research papers. Our two experimental systems, Quickstep and Foxtrot, create user profiles from unobtrusively monitored behaviour and relevance feedback, representing the profiles in terms of a research paper topic ontology. A novel profile visualization approach is taken to acquire profile feedback. Research papers are classified using ontological classes and collaborative recommendation algorithms used to recommend papers seen by similar people on their current topics of interest. Ontological inference is shown to improve user profiling, external ontological knowledge used to successfully bootstrap a recommender system and profile visualization employed to improve profiling accuracy.
In a specific case study we report results from two small-scale experiments, with 24 subjects over 3 months, and a large-scale experiment, with 260 subjects over an academic year, are conducted to evaluate different aspects of our approach. The overall performance of our ontological recommender systems are favourably compared to other systems in the literature.
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