Enhancing Human-Computer Interaction in Digital Repositories through a MCDA-Based Recommender System

Digital repositories contain a large amount of content, which is available to heterogeneous groups of people. As such, in many cases people encounter difficulties in finding specific content which is related to their preferences. In view of this compelling need and towards advancing human-computer interaction, this paper presents a recommender system which is incorporated in a digital repository. The recommender system is designed using multiple-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) and more specifically the weighted sum model (WSM) in order to refine the delivered content to the users. It also considers several users’ characteristics (their preferences as depicted by the content they visited or searched and by the frequency of searches/visits) and features of the content (content types and traffic). The recommender system outputs the suggestions of content to users based on their preferences and interests. The presented recommender system was evaluated by real users, and the results show a high degree of accuracy in the recommended content and satisfaction by users.