Web Personalization and Cohort Information Services for Natural Resource Managers

Bing and Google are finely tuned to quickly serve the frequent and popular information needs of the masses. Topic specificity, customizability, and automatically pursuing the long term unique information needs of individual users are not among the strengths of current main stream search engines (Jansen, Spink, and Saracevic 2000) (Teevan, Dumais, and Horvitz 2005). This gap has inspired web personalization and collaborative information seeking tools such as Google Alerts and has encouraged topic-specific blogs and podcasts. Web personalization tools lie on a spectrum between individualized and fully coordinated searches, between short and long term information interests and between public and private information needs. Much research attention has recently focused on web personalization (Castellano and Torsello 2009) (Smyth et al. 2009) (Chu and Park 2009) (Memari, Amer, and Gmez 2010) (Stamou and Ntoulas 2009) (Lacomme, Demazeau, and Camps 2010) (Amin and Nayak 2010). We aim to address yet unanswered questions in web personalization by providing an integrated view of documents found through different tools, considering user confidentiality, emphasizing the benefits of client-side web personalization, and highlighting the power of social webpage recommendation when traditional information retrieval and collaborative filtering methods are used in conjunction. These principles define a framework which leverages groupings of users with overlapping interests called user cohorts.