About Skipforward

Skipforward is a distributed recommendation system using a lightweight ontology approach for formalizing opinions about item features. Items can be things such as songs or board games; example item features are the genre of a song or the degree of chance in a board game. Every user of the system is free to add new items and statements about existing items to the system. Naturally, opinions may differ between users---the system even encourages people to express dissent by supporting negation for item features. Skipforward allows discussions for any item feature as well as displaying these discussions in a way similar to web forums.

Skipforward uses the ​GNU Affero General Public License version 3.

Features

• supports ontology-based subjective personalized annotations using the Skipinions ontology
• implements personalized views using weighted aggregation of multiple statements concerning one item and feature type
  • competence metric works per feature type and is based on modified Pearson correlation
• recommender functionality for...
  • similar items (based on their annotations)
  • items matching a predefined annotation profile
  • item annotations (recommending feature types highly relevant for the item recommender but not yet present for the current item)
  • experts (users with high correlation concerning one feature type)
• explanations available for recommendations
• personalized RSS newsfeeds
• all information available as Linked Open Data, too
• distributed design based on full replication using ​XMPP
• integrated with DBTropes

Starting Points

• ​Demo installation - "Login as demo user" logs you in read-only.
  • GettingStarted - how to log in and set up the system using an own XMPP account.
• DBTropes demo installation (offline) - featuring all of the DBTropes data. ​Details.
  • This is single-user, read-only, some features have been disabled due to the large amount of data, and XMPP connectivity has been disabled.
• Screencasts
  • Interzone use case - based on revision 573 (2011-09-26)
    • This illustrates short story annotation and search.
  • ​(Old) screencast - based on revision 224 (2008-10-26).
    • Features not demonstrated here: Trust network and opinion/user similarity metrics, alternative user interface, RSS feeds, improved search.

Development

• Browse source
• SVN repository is available at ​https://skipforward.opendfki.de/repos/trunk/
• Ideas collection
• Developer documentation

Contact

• ​Malte Kiesel

Publications

• Malte Kiesel, Facilitating Collaborative Ontology-Based Annotations in Communities of Interest. ​Doctoral Thesis, 2014.
• Malte Kiesel, Injy Hamed, Goal-Oriented Annotation Recommenders. ​SWCS workshop at ​ESWC 2013.
• Malte Kiesel, Florian Mittag. Personalization in Skipforward, an Ontology-Based Distributed Annotation System. ​SPIM workshop, ​ISWC 2011. ​Paper.
• Malte Kiesel, Sven Schwarz. Skipforward---a Lightweight Ontology-Based Peer-To-Peer Recommendation System. ​ISWC 2008 Demonstration. ​CEUR-WS Volume 401. ​Poster.