A web-based environment to support online and collaborative group recommendation scenarios

Abstract

Today there are many recommendation scenarios that involve groups of interrelated users intending to participate in a group activity. Though there have been attempts to establish group recommendation scenarios, most of them focus on off-line environments. In this article, we present a novel web-based environment that supports online group recommendation scenarios. Specifically, we propose a COllaborative Advisory CHannel for group recommendations called gCOACH. First, we present the conceptual architecture of gCOACH, which is domain independent and is a web-based environment for enabling the interaction of users from anywhere. Second, we introduce the multiple interaction modalities of this environment developed to communicate, coordinate, and persuade the group in a case-based group recommender. We demonstrate its usability through a live-user case-study.