Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence 75 (2018) 1–10 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/engappai Sharing notes: An academic social network based on a personalized fuzzy linguistic recommender system C. Porcel b, *, A. Ching-López a , G. Lefranc c , V. Loia d , E. Herrera-Viedma a, * a Department of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, University of Granada, Granada, Spain b Department of Computer Science, University of Jaén, Jaén, Spain c Escuela de Ingeniería Eléctrica, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, Chile d Department of Management and Innovation Systems, University of Salerno, Fisciano (SA), Italy ARTICLE INFO Keywords: Recommender systems Educational social networks Fuzzy linguistic modeling ABSTRACT Social networks are Web systems that enable and encourage a collaborative work, making it possible to exchange information between users, which makes them especially useful in many areas. Specifically, they could be used in an academic environment with the aim of improving the educational processes, not replacing, but complementing the most traditional face-to-face models. But nowadays the increasingly widespread use of new technologies and social networks is causing the information we have available to grow disproportionately, making it more difficult and expensive to access information of interest. To alleviate this problem, automatic tools such as recommender systems, could be used to facilitate the accesses to relevant information, that in an academic environment would help to customize the educational processes. So, in this paper we present SharingNotes, an academic social network that can generate personalized recommendations to improve teaching and learning processes. To achieve this goal, it incorporates a hybrid recommender system that uses an ontology to characterize the degrees of trust among network users, and adopts the fuzzy linguistic modeling to improve the representation of information. Then, the use of this platform allows adapting the educational process to the circumstances of each student. The evaluation developed demonstrates the usefulness of this educational social network, as well as the users’ satisfaction while interacting and working with it. 1. Introduction The main reasons that govern the new education scenarios involve a reform of the educational system focused on the learning and active role of the students, as well as in building knowledge as the complete in- tegration of information and communication technologies in education systems (Bhattacharya and Nath, 2016; Cobos et al., 2013; Moscoso, 2003; Secades and Arranz, 2016). New technologies enrich the learning process with the capabilities of spreading the information in an easy and efficient manner, besides giving the participants (professors, students, experts, and so on) tools for both personal and group communication that reinforce the tutorship action and the collaborative learning. In this manner, social networks are one of the Web technologies that facilitate and promote this collaborative work (Capuano et al., 2018). These are defined as Web services that enable the users to set up a public or semi-public profile within a bounded environment, establish a list of users to maintain a connection with, and see and traverse its * Corresponding authors. E-mail addresses: cporcel@ujaen.es (C. Porcel), alch@decsai.ugr.es (A. Ching-López), gaston.lefranc@gmail.com (G. Lefranc), loia@unisa.it (V. Loia), viedma@decsai.ugr.es (E. Herrera-Viedma). own list as well as the ones established by other users inside the system (Boyd and Ellison, 2007). To achieve this, and depending on the case, social networks give to the users some tools for building groups, private messaging, public messaging, internal e-mail or chat, among others (Herrera-Viedma et al., 2017). But more significant are the networks that provide information exchange between users, because this made them really suitable for some professional environments (Alonso et al., 2013). For example, these are successfully applied in the corporate world where they are set up as platforms that changes the corporate work strategy following the same open and dynamic way of other sites such as Facebook 1 or Twitter, 2 but specially oriented to encourage interaction, collaborative work, innovation and productivity in business 1 https://www.facebook.com/. 2 https://twitter.com/. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.engappai.2018.07.007 Received 24 July 2017; Received in revised form 30 April 2018; Accepted 24 July 2018 0952-1976/© 2018 Published by Elsevier Ltd.