A Domain Ontology in Social Networks for Identifying User Interest for Personalized Recommendations

Social media and the development of web 2.0 encourage the user to participate more interactively in social networks. In social network relationships may be identified by the user posts and interactions. Using this data, the system can make recommendations tailored to specific users. However, when the user is on social network for the first time, the recommendation system cannot make recommendations, since the user has no history. In this paper, we design an ontology combined with social networks. We develop the ontology based on data from users and their friends. Using the user interest and community influences, we propose a system to solve the cold start problem in recommendation systems. The system calculates the similarity between users, using user preferences and uses a rule generating algorithm to create the dynamic inference rule. The ontology is updated each time the content of the personal ontology is updated. The newest ontology will be retained to increase the accuracy the next time the recommendation system is executed.