Designing a personalized semantic Web browser

Abstract

Web browsing is a complex activity and in general, users are not guided during browsing. Our hypothesis is that by using Semantic Web technologies and personalization methods, browsing can be supported better. However, existing personalization mechanisms on the Web are obstructive; users need to log in to multiple websites and enter their personal information and preferences, and the profiles are different for each site. There is a need for generic user profiles, which can also support the user's browsing. In this paper, we propose a novel Semantic Web browser using an ontology-driven user modeling architecture to enable semantic and adaptive links. We also introduce a new behavior-based user model. With our approach, users need to log in to their Web browser only and personalization is achieved on different websites. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2008.