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 la, cura, 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 parti ...

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

Concept

Museums A museum ( ; plural museums or, rarely, musea) is a building or institution that cares for and displays a collection of artifacts and other objects of artistic, cultural, historical, or scientific importance. Many public museums make thes ...

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 a technique used by recommender systems.Francesco Ricci and Lior Rokach and Bracha ShapiraIntroduction to Recommender Systems Handbook Recommender Systems Handbook, Springer, 2011, pp. 1-35 Collaborative filtering ...

* Semantic analysis * Social rating

Collaborative filtering

is a method of forecasting often used in

recommendation systems A recommender system, or a recommendation system (sometimes replacing 'system' with a synonym such as platform or engine), is a subclass of information filtering system that provide suggestions for items that are most pertinent to a particular u ...

. 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 (; stylized in all lowercase as reddit) is an American social news news aggregator, aggregation, Review site#Rating site, content rating, and Internet forum, discussion website. Registered users (commonly referred to as "Redditors") subm ...

and

Digg Digg, stylized in lowercase as digg, is an American news aggregator with a curated front page, aiming to select stories specifically for the Internet audience such as science, trending political issues, and viral Internet issues. It was launche ...

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

YouTube YouTube is a global online video sharing and social media platform headquartered in San Bruno, California. It was launched on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. It is owned by Google, and is the second most ...

and

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

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 observed ...

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

Stumbleupon StumbleUpon was a discovery and advertisement engine (a form of web search engine) that pushed web content recommendations to its users. Its features allowed users to discover and rate Web pages, photos and videos that are personalized to their ...

, 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 an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin ...

and

Flipboard Flipboard is a news aggregator and social network aggregation company based in Palo Alto, California, with offices in New York, Vancouver, and Bejiing. Its software, also known as Flipboard, was first released in July 2010. It aggregates conte ...

. 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 image sharing and social media service designed to enable saving and discovery of information (specifically "ideas") on the internet using images, and on a smaller scale, animated GIFs and videos, in the form of pinboa ...

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

References