Patent attributes
A method and apparatus for joint profiling for identifying one or more common interests of members of a group and recommending items accordingly. The method comprises receiving a user profile for each member, the user profile comprising a set of one or more topics of interest to that member; automatically mapping at least one topic from each of the profiles to a concept; deriving a group profile, in dependence upon the concepts and the topics; and generating a list of recommended items for the group based on the group profile. Also presented is a method and apparatus for joint profiling wherein a joint weight for each topic is calculated by: for each user, calculating the reciprocal of a weight associated with the topic for that user; calculating the sum of the resulting reciprocals; and calculating the joint weight as the reciprocal of the resulting sum.
