User awareness in CYCLADES: a collaborative and personalized environment for open digital archives

Every day a huge amount of newly created information is electronically published in Digital Libraries. Complementary to the usual vision, we envisage a Digital Library not only as an information source where users may submit queries to satisfy their daily information need, but also as a collaborative working and meeting space of people sharing common interests. CYCLADES is a system, which combines several technologies from the Information Retrieval and Digital Library area, providing a highly personalized environment where not only users may organize (and search into) the information space according to an individual flavor, but, and more importantly, also provides support for advanced collaborative work. In particular, users may build communities, may become aware of each other, exchange information and knowledge with other users, and may get recommendations from the system based on preference patterns of users. We will present some experimental results showing the effectiveness of CYCLADES in relating users with similar interests to each other. This is important as it may help users to get aware of other users sharing similar interest and to enter maybe into long-term relationships.