Title: Ontological technologies for user modelling

Authors: Sergey Sosnovsky, Darina Dicheva

Addresses: School of Information Sciences, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15260, USA. ' Department of Computer Science, Winston-Salem State University, Winston Salem, NC 27110, USA

Abstract: This paper brings together research from two different fields – user modelling and web ontologies – in attempt to demonstrate how recent semantic trends in web development can be combined with the modern technologies of user modelling. Over the last several years, a number of user-adaptive systems have been exploiting ontologies for the purposes of semantics representation, automatic knowledge acquisition, domain and user model visualisation and creation of interoperable and reusable architectural solutions. Before discussing these projects, we first overview the underlying user modelling and ontological technologies. As an example of the project employing ontology-based user modelling, we present an experiment design for translation of overlay student models for relative domains by means of ontology mapping.

Keywords: user modelling; web ontologies; adaptation; semantic web; ontology mapping.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMSO.2010.032649

International Journal of Metadata, Semantics and Ontologies, 2010 Vol.5 No.1, pp.32 - 71

Received: 03 Jan 2009
Accepted: 10 Sep 2009
Published online: 09 Apr 2010 *

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