Twixonomy visualization interface: How to wander around user preferences

User interfaces have become essential tools for a user to interact with a recommender system. In the two most common settings, the user interface either helps users to collect their preferences, or to provide an explanation of the generated recommendations. In this paper, we present the Twixonomy Visualization Interface, a tool that allows users both to explore their preferences and to discover new ones. Preferences are represented by a Wikipedia Category DAG connected with the initial (primitive) preferences implicitly or explicitly expressed by the user. Our tool can be considered as an integration of a recommender system since, by exploring the DAG, the user can both analyse the connections between his/her preferred items and other semantically related items or categories, and understand the motivations for new, serendipitous recommendations.