Exploiting ontologies for better recommendations

Traditional recommender systems as they are mostly used in today's recommendation applications (e.g. the SMART Recommendations Engine of Fraunhofer FOKUS) primarily concentrate on recommending items to users. However, thinking of many modern (mobile) applications, contextual and semantic information may provide a significant preciseness to the recommendation process. That's why, Fraunhofer FOKUS' engine has been extended by two new extensions making the engine capable of incorporating contextual and semantic information when generating recommendations. This paper focuses on one of them, the SMART Ontology Extension