Affiliations: Department of EECS, 2001 Eaton Hall, University of
Kansas, Lawrence, KS 66045, USA. Tel.: +1 785 864 7755; Fax: +1 785 864 0387;
E-mail: [email protected] | MetaTV, Inc., Mill Valley, CA 94941, USA. E-mail:
[email protected] | Institut fur Informatik, Technische Universitat
Munchen, Munchen, Germany. E-mail: [email protected]
Abstract: As the number of Internet users and the number of accessible Web
pages grows, it is becoming increasingly difficult for users to find documents
that are relevant to their particular needs. Users must either browse through a
large hierarchy of concepts to find the information for which they are looking
or submit a query to a publicly available search engine and wade through
hundreds of results, most of them irrelevant. The core of the problem is that
whether the user is browsing or searching, whether they are an eighth grade
student or a Nobel prize winner, the identical information is selected and it
is presented the same way. In this paper, we report on research that adapts
information navigation based on a user profile structured as a weighted concept
hierarchy. A user may create his or her own concept hierarchy and use them for
browsing Web sites. Or, the user profile may be created from a reference
ontology by 'watching over the user's shoulder' while they browse. We show that
these automatically created profiles reflect the user's interests quite well
and they are able to produce moderate improvements when applied to search
results.
Keywords: ontologies, personalization, browsing, Web navigation, conceptual search
