Modeling Ontology-Driven Personalization of Web Contents

Personalization of contents accessed on the Web can be improved by proper exploitation of user preferences and navigation behavior. Such profile information may be provided by metadata and should be managed through state-of-the-art Web engineering methodologies and notations. In our proposal, we exploit existing solutions in the field of knowledge representation and Web applications conceptual specification, and we provide: (i) a set of ontologies for representing both user profile and preferences, together with a good metadata design for describing them; (ii) a set of techniques for registering preferences explicitly declared by the user, as well as user navigation behavior automatically recorded; and (iii) some basic methods for delivering personalized content to the user based on metadata management. We base our method on the well known Web modeling language called WebML, extended with a set of new primitives for exploiting personalization metadata.