Portable Taste Data - OpenTaste
One of the problems that plagues recommender systems is the New User
problem - how do you give recommendations to someone who has just come
to your site for the first time? Well, you could ask them lots of
questions about themselves, but that can be off-putting, most folks
don't want to wait even 3 seconds for a web page, how can you expect
them to fill out an extensive questionnaire describing their likes and
dislikes? You could just ignore the problem and generate recommendations
based upon the slimmest of data, like a single favorite artist. Or you
could just recommend what is popular. But you run the risk of
alienating your new visitor with these generic, non-personalized
recommendations.
It would be nice if people carried around some representation of their taste so when they visited a new site, they could get good recommendations right away. This certainly would be good for the individual - they would be spared from having to re-enter all of their preference data every time they visit a new site - and it would be great for every web startup that wants to make sure they deliver the most appropriate content to their visitors, even for first time visitors.
There are a number of attempts to create a representation for portable taste data. There's the Attention Profile Markup Language (APML), there's the Matchkey. Now there's one more - OpenTaste. OpenTaste an open standard for making your online persona portable. OpenTaste profiles allow you to capture your preferences, store them online, and share them --- or not --- with OpenTaste-enabled websites. Technically speaking OpenTaste is a open protocol standard based on OAuth and OpenID that enables the markup of preference semantics in RDF/XML, XML, and HTML with microformats. In some ways you can look at OpenTaste as APML with semantics. The XML version of OpenTaste even uses APML syntax to represent explicit and implicit attention, but then layers analysis models for attention and preferences, along with semantic relationships to ensure that the concepts are clear and unambiguous.
OpenTaste is a new effort being spearheaded by strands - the site has just gone live, with specifications, examples and schemas. More info is promised in the OpenTaste blog. Given that one of the categories on the blog is 'W3C' - it looks like OpenTaste may be going the formal standard route. Soon, perhaps there will be standard way of specify portable taste data - solving the New User problem once and for all.