Connectivity, networking, and the National Information Infrastructure have become the buzzwords of the day. Underlying the excitement of these times is the promise that each of us will soon have unlimited access to a computer which will cheaply bring to us information from sources around the world. We will be in direct contact with all the world's repositories of information - no matter how small or large - and in direct contact with the experts and people who create those repositories. Just like the upswell of creation and learning which followed the development of the printing press and the widespread access to information it created, we anticipate a new surge of knowledge that will enrich our lives.
Unfortunately, our situation parallels that of the printing press in more ways than one. As the first libraries were built and books became available to larger groups of people, a new problem arose. Once buildings could be filled with more piles of books than any human could possibly read in a lifetime, how could people find books on the topics they wanted? The solution to that problem evolved into an entire field called Library Science. A solution to the problem of finding useful information on a global network promises to be no easier.
In this thesis we describe one possible system for helping users find the information they want from the stacks of the global internet. The system works by making it possible for users at distant sites to take advantage of each others' experiences with information sources. These experiences can then be called on by users to direct their information searches. Our approach is derived from the Information Tapestry project at Xerox PARC and we use their name to describe it - collaborative filtering.
In the sections that follow we first present an example of the type of information system we will be working with, and then describe the various types of filtering currently in use for that information system. In chapter 2 we form a specification of what we want our filtering system to accomplish. For chapter 3 we discuss the constraints imposed on our system by the information system we are filtering. In chapter 4 we develop the design of our system, and we conclude by describing user's opinions and usage of our system.