Ontological User Profiles for Representing Context in Web Search

The goal of Web search personalization is to tailor search results to a particular user based on that user´s interests and preferences. We present an approach to personalized search that involves building models of user context as ontological profiles by assigning implicitly derived interest scores to existing concepts in a domain ontology. Our experiments show that re-ranking the search results based on the interest scores and the semantic evidence in an ontological user profile is effective in presenting the most relevant results to the user.