Semantic Distance Spreading Across Entities in Linked Open Data

Recommender systems can utilize Linked Open Data (LOD) to overcome some challenges, such as the item cold start problem, as well as the problem of explaining the recommendation. There are several techniques in exploiting LOD in recommender systems; one approach, called Linked Data Semantic Distance (LDSD), considers nearby resources to be recommended by calculating a semantic distance between resources. The LDSD approach, however, has some drawbacks such as its inability to measure the semantic distance resources that are not directly linked to each other. In this paper, we first propose another variation of the LDSD approach, called wtLDSD, by extending indirect distance calculations to include the effect of multiple links of differing properties within LOD, while prioritizing link properties. Next, we introduce an approach that broadens the coverage of LDSD-based approaches beyond resources that are more than two links apart. Our experimental results show that approaches we propose improve the accuracy of the LOD-based recommendations over our baselines. Furthermore, the results show that the propagation of semantic distance calculation to reflect resources further away in the LOD graph extends the coverage of LOD-based recommender systems.