Personalized Web Search Based on Ontological User Profile in Transportation Domain

Abstract

Current conventional search engines deliver similar results to all users for the same query. Because of the variety of user interests and preferences, personalized search engines, based on semantics, hold the promise of providing more efficient information that better reflects users’ needs. The main feature of building a personalized web search is to represent user interests in terms of user profiles. This paper proposes a personalized search approach using an ontology-based user profile. The aim of this approach is to build user profiles based on user browsing behavior and semantic knowledge of specific domain ontology to enhance the quality of the search results. The proposed approach utilizes a re-ranked algorithm to sort the results returned by the search engine to provide a search result that best relates to the user query. This algorithm evaluates the similarity between a user query, the retrieved search results and the ontological concepts. This similarity is computed by taking into account a user’s explicit browsing behavior, semantic knowledge of concepts, and synonyms of term-based vectors extracted from the WordNet API. A set of experiments using a case study from a transport service domain validates the effectiveness of the proposed approach and demonstrates promising results.