Visualizing Users, User Communities, and Usage Trends in Complex Information Systems Using Implicit Rating Data

Research on personalization, including recommender systems, focuses on applications such as in online shopping malls and simple information systems. These systems consider user profile and item information obtained from data explicitly entered by users. There it is possible to classify items involved and to personalize based on a direct mapping from user or user group to item or item group. However, in complex, dynamic, and professional information systems, such as digital libraries, additional capabilities are needed to achieve personalization to support their distinctive features: large numbers of digital objects, dynamic updates, sparse rating data, biased rating data on specific items, and challenges in getting explicit rating data from users. For this reason, more research on implicit rating data is recommended, because it is easy to obtain, suffers less from terminology issues, is more informative, and contains more user-centered information. In previous reports on my doctoral work, I discussed collecting, storing, processing, and utilizing implicit rating data of digital libraries for analysis and decision support. This dissertation presents a visualization tool, VUDM (Visual User-model Data Mining tool), utilizing implicit rating data, to demonstrate the effectiveness of implicit rating data in characterizing users, user communities, and usage trends of digital libraries. The results of user studies, performed both with typical end-users and with library experts, to test the usefulness of VUDM, support that implicit rating data is useful and can be utilized for digital library analysis software, so that both end users and experts can benefit.