Recommender systems and the social web

In the past, classic recommender systems relied solely on the user models they were able to construct by themselves and suffered from the "cold start" problem. Recent decade advances, among them internet connectivity and data sharing, now enable them to bootstrap their user models from external sources such as user modeling servers or other recommender systems. However, this approach has only been demonstrated by research prototypes. Recent developments have brought a new source for bootstrapping recommender systems: social web services. The variety of social web services, each with its unique user model characteristics, could aid bootstrapping recommender systems in different ways. In this paper we propose a mapping of how each of the classical user modeling approaches can benefit from nowadays active services' user models, and also supply an example of a possible application.