Towards an Architecture for Personalization and Adaptivity in the Semantic Web

A semantic web is expected to underpin richer, and more automated, forms of interaction than web services and data allow today. However unlike syntactic forms, interpretations cannot be standardized across all potential users, or even be kept constant over time for a specific user. While a semantic web allows users to go beyond the syntax of resources by appealing to meta-resources and, more expressively, ontologies, it also raises the issue as to how are users to specify their own interpretations of web components and to avoid being overburdened with the need to keep those interpretations afresh. This paper argues that personalization and adaptivity are key technologies in addressing this particular issue for a semantic web. Without a proper solution the semantic web will be less usable than the vision would suggest it to be. The paper motivates the need for such technologies via an e-commerce use case and sketches an architecture that can be used to underpin their realization as concrete software components.