A Decentralized Recommendation System based on Self-Organizing Partnerships

Small World patterns have been found in many social and natural networks, and even in Peer-to-Peer topologies. In this paper, we analyze File Sharing applications that aggregate virtual communities of users exchanging data. In these domains, it is possible to define overlaying structures that we call “Preference Networks” that show self organized interest-based clusters. The relevance of this finding is augmented with the introduction of a proactive recommendation scheme that exploits this natural feature. The intuition behind this scheme is that a user would trust her network of “elective affinities” more than anonymous and generic suggestions made by impersonal entities.