Patent ID: 8577831

Claim:
A method of recommending items to a user comprising: identifying and displaying one or more items that is known to be of interest to a user based on a query input by the user; aggregating usage information into a superlog, wherein the usage information is online transactions involving items in Digital Libraries and performed by users from worldwide institutions; recording the usage information by linking servers used by these institutions; deriving a network representation of said superlog by representing each item involved in a transaction as a node on a graph and analyzing the contained transactions to derive relationships between nodes; performing computations on the one or more items known to be of interest to the user in relation to the network representation of the superlog with the objective of obtaining a result for the identified item; and displaying a result based on the one or more items known to be of interest to the user, wherein said result consists of a listing of item-level recommendations based on the usage information, wherein: the aggregating step consists of aggregating usage information using a metadata harvester; said network representation comprises connections between said nodes based on co-retrieval of items represented by said nodes, said connections being represented as weighted edges between said nodes; said superlog and the network representation of said superlog is derived only from usage data; and computations on the one or more items known to be of interest to the user with the objective of obtaining the result are performed using local neighborhood search algorithms incorporating a spreading activation method.