Recommending multimedia web services in a multi-device environment

In the last years, the Web community has shown a broad interest in Web services that handle multimedia contents. To improve the usability of these services different tools have been proposed in the literature, and in this context agent-based recommender systems appear to be a promising solution. However, the recommender systems presented in the past do not take into account, in their recommendation algorithms, the effect of the device exploited by the user, while it is clear that the same user shows a different behavior in the presence of different devices. This paper tries to give a contribution in this setting, in order to match more accurately user preferences and interests. In particular, a new agent-based system is proposed, whose architecture allows to compute recommendations of multimedia Web services, considering the effect of the currently exploited device. Some experimental results confirm the high quality of the recommendations generated by the proposed approach. (c) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.