Multi-layered ontology-based user profiles and semantic social networks for recommender systems

This is an electronic version of the paper presented at the International Workshop on Web Personalisation, Recommender Systems and Intelligent User Interfaces (WPRSIUI 2006) at the International Conference on Adaptive Hypermedia and Adaptive Web-Based Systems (AH 2006), held in Dublin on 2006This paper describes a strategy that automatically clusters ontology-based user profiles taking into account their common interests for domain con-cepts. The obtained semantic clusters are used to identify similarities among indi-viduals at multiple semantic preference layers, and to define emergent, layered so-cial networks that can be applied in collaborative and recommender systems. As an applicative development of our method, we have experimented with building a personalized information retrieval model that provides ranked item lists based on the existing concept clusters and multi-layered user networks.This research was supported by the European Commission (FP6-027685-MESH), and the Spanish Ministry of Science and Education (TIN2005-06885). The expressed content is the view of the authors but not necessarily the view of the MESH project as a whol