Fab: content-based, collaborative recommendation.(Special Section: Recommender Systems)

Fab is a recommendation system designed to help users sift through the enormous amount of information available in the World Wide Web. Operational since Dec. 1994, this system combines the content-based and collaborative methods of recommendation in a way that exploits the advantages of the two approaches while avoiding their shortcomings. Fab’s hybrid structure allows for automatic recognition of emergent issues relevant to various groups of users. It also enables two scaling problems, pertaining to the rising number of users and documents, to be addressed.