Content curation is the process of gathering information relevant to a particular topic or area of interest, usually with the intention of adding value through the process of selecting, organizing, and looking after the items in a collection or exhibition. Services or people that implement content curation are called

curator A curator (from , meaning 'to take care') is a manager or overseer. When working with cultural organizations, a curator is typically a "collections curator" or an "exhibitions curator", and has multifaceted tasks dependent on the particular ins ...

s. Curation services can be used by businesses as well as end users.

Concept

Museums A museum is an institution dedicated to displaying or preserving culturally or scientifically significant objects. Many museums have exhibitions of these objects on public display, and some have private collections that are used by researchers ...

and galleries have curators to select and interpret items for collection and display. There are also curators in the world of media, for instance DJs of radio stations tasked with selecting songs to be played over the air.

Methods

Content curation can be carried out either manually or automatically or by combination of them. In the first case, it's done by specially designated curators. In the second case, it's done using one or more of the following: *

Collaborative filtering Collaborative filtering (CF) is, besides content-based filtering, one of two major techniques used by recommender systems.Francesco Ricci and Lior Rokach and Bracha ShapiraIntroduction to Recommender Systems Handbook, Recommender Systems Handbo ...

* Semantic analysis * Social rating

Collaborative filtering

is a method of forecasting often used in

recommendation systems A recommender system (RecSys), or a recommendation system (sometimes replacing ''system'' with terms such as ''platform'', ''engine'', or ''algorithm'') and sometimes only called "the algorithm" or "algorithm", is a subclass of information fi ...

. This principle is based on the axiom that evaluations made by users in the past are predictive of evaluations that they will make in the future. Collaborative filtering can either be based on votes and views of a given social community, as it's done on

Reddit Reddit ( ) is an American Proprietary software, proprietary social news news aggregator, aggregation and Internet forum, forum Social media, social media platform. Registered users (commonly referred to as "redditors") submit content to the ...

and

Digg Digg (stylized in lowercase as digg) is an American news aggregator with a curated front page, aiming to select articles specifically for the Internet audience such as science, trending political issues, and viral phenomenon, viral Internet iss ...

, or the end user's own prior activity, as it's done on

YouTube YouTube is an American social media and online video sharing platform owned by Google. YouTube was founded on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim who were three former employees of PayPal. Headquartered in ...

and

Amazon Amazon most often refers to: * Amazon River, in South America * Amazon rainforest, a rainforest covering most of the Amazon basin * Amazon (company), an American multinational technology company * Amazons, a tribe of female warriors in Greek myth ...

Semantic analysis

Semantic analysis examines the relationship between the various elements and sources of information found in a given document. The system compares some of the factors or all the information sources topics and terms. This method uses the principles of

factor analysis Factor analysis is a statistical method used to describe variability among observed, correlated variables in terms of a potentially lower number of unobserved variables called factors. For example, it is possible that variations in six observe ...

to analyze relationships between the studied phenomena and objects. This approach has been successfully implemented by services like

Stumbleupon StumbleUpon was a website, browser extension, toolbar, and mobile app with a "Stumble!" button that, when pushed, opened a semi-random website or video that matched the user's interests, similar to a random web search engine. Users were able to ...

, which break up content according to topic, subtopic, and category. Trapit uses semantic analysis in combination with user feedback and AI technology to refine content selections for its users.

Social rating

This method employs user ratings and recommendations to select content. The system finds someone with interests similar to the end user and bases its recommendations on their activity. This method of selection is widely used on social sites such as

Facebook Facebook is a social media and social networking service owned by the American technology conglomerate Meta Platforms, Meta. Created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with four other Harvard College students and roommates, Eduardo Saverin, Andre ...

and Flipboard. Parameters for determining the social ranking are generally based on actions such as shares, votes, likes, etc., keeping in mind the time that these activities are carried out once the content is published. The more there are such activities in a shorter time, the higher rating this content gets. "Social curation" services like

Pinterest Pinterest is an American social media service for publishing and discovery of information in the form of digital Bulletin board, pinboards. This includes recipes, home, style, motivation, and inspiration on the Internet using image sharing. Pint ...

allow users to share and discuss their curated collections of found content.

References