Using collaborative filtering to weave an information tapestry

Abstract

Tapestry is an experimental mail system developed at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center.The motivation for Tapestry comes from the increasing use of electronic mail, which is resulting in users being inundated by a huge stream of incoming documents [2, 7, 12].One way to handle large volumes of mail is to provide mailing lists, enabling users to subscribe only to those lists of interest to them.However, as illustrated in Figure 1, the set of documents of interest to a particular user rarely map neatly to existing lists.A better solution is for a user to specify afi'lter that scans all lists, selecting interesting documents no matter what list they are in.Several mail systems support filtering based on a document's contents [3, 5, 6, 8].A basic tenet of the Tapestry work is that more effective filtering can be done by involving humans in the filtering process.In addition to content-based filtering, the Tapestry system was designed and built to support coUaborativefi'ltering. Collaborative filtering simply means that people collaborate to help one another perform filtering by recording their reactions to documents they read.Such reactions may be that a document was particularly interesting (or particularly uninteresting).These reactions, more generally called annotations, can be accessed by others' filters.One application of annotations is in support of moderated newsgroups.