The next generation of personalization systems

Coping with today’s unprecedented information overload problem necessitates the deployment of personalization services. Typical personalization approaches model user preferences and store them in user profiles, used to deliver personalized content. A traditional method for profile representation is the so called keyword-based representation, where the user interests are modelled using keywords which are selected from the contents of the items which the user has rated. Although, keyword based approaches are simple and are extensively used for profile representation they fail to represent semantic-based information, this information is lost during the pre-processing phase. Future trends in personalization systems necessitate more innovative personalization techniques that are able to capture rich semanticbased information during the representation, modelling and learning phases. In recent years ontologies (key concepts and along with their interrelationships) to express semantic-based information have been very popular in domain knowledge representation. The primary goal of this chapter is to present an overview of the state-of-the art techniques and methodologies which aim to integrate personalization technologies with semantic-based information