Personalization for the Semantic Web

Searching for the meaning of the word “personalization” on a popular search engine, one finds twenty-three different answers, including “the process of matching categorized content with different end users based on business rules ... upon page request to a Web server”, “using continually adjusted user profiles to match content or services to individuals”, and also “real-time tailoring of displays, particularly Web pages, to a specific customer’s known preferences, such as previous purchases”. A little more generally, personalization is a process by which it is possible to give the user optimal support in accessing, retrieving, and storing information, where solutions are built so as to fit the preferences, the characteristics and the taste of the individual. This result can be achieved only by exploiting machine-interpretable semantic information, e.g. about the possible resources, about the user him/herself, about the context, about the goal of the interaction. Personalization is realized by an inferencing process applied to the semantic information, which can be carried out in many different ways depending on the specific task. The objective of this paper is to provide a coherent introduction into issues and methods for realizing personalization in the Semantic Web.