An Ontology Like Model for gathering Personalized Web Information

Abstract

In recent days the amount of Information Available on the internet is huge when compared to past few decades. How to gather useful information from the web has become a challenging issue for users. Current web information gathering systems trying to satisfy user requirements by looking at their information needs. For this purpose, user profiles are created for user background knowledge description. User profiles represent the concept models possessed by users when gathering web information. A concept model is implicitly possessed by users and is generated from their background knowledge. While this concept model cannot be proven in laboratories, many web ontologists have observed it in user behaviour. When users read through a document, they can easily determine whether or not it is of their interest or relevance to them, a judgment that arises from their implicit concept models. If a user’s concept model can be simulated, then a superior representation of user profiles can be built. To simulate user concept models, ontology’s—a knowledge description and formalization model—are utilized in personalized web information gathering. Such ontology’s are called ontological user profiles or personalized ontology’s. To represent user profiles, many researchers have attempted to discover user background knowledge through global or local analysis.

Keywords: ontology, web information gathering, user profiles.