Introducing Semantics in Web Personalization: The Role of Ontologies

Web personalization is the process of customizing a web site to the needs of each specific user or set of users. Personalization of a web site may be performed by the provision of recommendations to the users, highlighting/adding links, creation of index pages, etc. The web personalization systems are mainly based on the exploitation of the navigational patterns of the web site’s visitors. When a personalization system relies solely on usage-based results, however, valuable information conceptually related to what is finally recommended may be missed. The exploitation of the web pages’ semantics can considerably improve the results of web usage mining and personalization, since it provides a more abstract yet uniform and both machine and human understandable way of processing and analyzing the usage data. The underlying idea is to integrate usage data with content semantics, expressed in ontology terms, in order to produce semantically enhanced navigational patterns that can subsequently be used for producing valuable recommendations. In this paper we propose a semantic web personalization system, focusing on word sense disambiguation techniques which can be applied in order to semantically annotate the web site’s content.