Construction of ontology-based user model for web personalization

Abstract

Personalized Web browsing and search hope to provide Web information that matches a user's personal interests. A key feature in developing successful personalized Web applications is to build user model that accurately represents a user's interests. This paper deals with the problem of modeling Web users by means of personal ontology. A Web log preparation system discovering user's semantic navigation sessions is presented first. Such semantic sessions could be used as the input of constructing ontology-based user model. Our construction of user model is based on a semantic representation of the user activity. We build the user model without user interaction, automatically monitoring the user's browsing habits, constructing the user ontology from semantic sessions. Each semantic session updates the user model in such a way that the conceptual behavior history of the user is recorded in user ontology. After building the initial model from visited Web pages, techniques are investigated to estimate model convergence. In particular, the overall performance of our ontology-based user model is also presented and favorably compared to other model using a flat, unstructured list of topics in the experimental systems. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.