Patent ID: 7954045

Claim:
A recommendatory information provision system comprising: a management apparatus; and a user terminal device, wherein: the management apparatus provides information concerning any recommended document relevant to a browsed document which is being browsed by the user terminal device to the user terminal device; the management apparatus includes: a browsed information acquisition unit that acquires information of the browsed document which is being browsed by the user terminal device; a recommended document retrieval unit that retrieves the recommended document relevant to the browsed document which is being browsed by the user terminal device, based on the acquired document information; a recommendation history management unit that stores and manages history information of recommendation, which was made by the recommended document retrieval unit in the past, of the recommended document; a recommendation history retrieval unit that retrieves from the recommendation history management unit, the history information of the recommendation, which was made by the recommended document retrieval unit in the past, of the recommended document which is retrieved by the recommended document retrieval unit; and a controller that is configured to allow each user to set a disclosure range corresponding to the history information that is disclosed to other users; a recommendatory information provision unit that provides to the user terminal device, the information concerning the recommended document and the history information of the recommendation of the recommended document, which is retrieved by the recommended document retrieval unit; and the user terminal device includes a display process unit that displays on a screen, the information concerning the recommended document and the history information of the recommendation of the recommended document which are provided from the management apparatus; the history information of the recommendation of the recommended document being history of (i) data indicating whether the recommended document was accessed; (ii) data indicating whether the recommended data was only recommended and not accessed; (iii) whether the user terminal device or another user terminal device has accessed the recommended document; and wherein the screen shows a table with the documents on one axis and the users on another axis, with grids that correspond to each user and document containing (i) a blank indicating that the corresponding document has not been recommended to or accessed by the corresponding user or (ii) a symbol which is selected from the group comprising a first symbol indicating the corresponding document has been recommended to and accessed by the corresponding user and a second symbol indicating the corresponding document has been recommended to but not accessed by the corresponding user.