Ontological user profile for E-orientation platforms

Abstract

In recent years, E-orientation systems have played an increasingly significant role in the proposal of an academic and professional orientation to students. Research efforts have grown to provide more useful and effective E-orientation systems for research or other purposes. The implementation of E-orientation systems resulting from these efforts utilizes several techniques including Artificial Intelligence (AI) methodologies. This study proposes a personalised approach to support an E-orientation system that is tailored to the student’s characteristics. A key component of this system comprises an ontological model of the user profile. The objective of this research was to propose an ontology that is able to collect and analyze the user related information as well as customize the profiles with the most appropriate recommendation or orientation. The ontology employed in this study was developed using the OWL (Ontology Web Language), a knowledge representation language for authoring ontologies. In this paper we will present a definition for the user profile, and then we present our methodology of ontological modeling of the user profile, and finally the conceptual model of the user model for e-orientation systems.