A trust-enhanced recommender system application

Recommender Systems (RS) suggests to users items they will like based on their past opinions. Collaborative Filtering (CF) is the most used technique to assess user similarity between users but very often the sparseness of user profiles prevents the computation. Moreover CF doesn't take into account the reliability of the other users. In this paper we present a real world application, namely moleskiing.it, in which both of these conditions are critic to deliver personalized recommendations. A blog oriented architecture collects user experiences on ski mountaineering and their opinions on other users. Exploitation of Trust Metrics allows to present only relevant and reliable information according to the user's personal point of view of other authors trustworthiness. Differently from the notion of authority, we claim that trustworthiness is a user centered notion that requires the computation of personalized metrics. We also present an open information exchange architecture that makes use of Semantic Web formats to guarantee interoperability between ski mountaineering communities.