Towards Spatial Web Personalization

In the past few years, spatial information and services have proliferated on the Web, due to the fact that most of our daily activities are related to the spatial dimension. The user communities involved in spatial web services are essentially diverse, still in an expansion and transformation with constantly increasing number of user and applications. This opens many research challenges, such as the elicitation of user's interests and preferences and customization of information services on the spatial Web. This PhD research proposes an integrated framework for user modeling and preference elicitation, and personalization services on the spatial Web. The framework identifies personalization services and a semantic user model for spatial web applications. These two components communicate information and knowledge about the user through inter-process communications. The personalization services are based on three mechanisms: the Bi-directional Neural Associative Memory, user-centric spatial proximity and similarity measures, image schemata and affordance concepts. A web-based user interface is integrated with these components, and offers a spectrum of personalized search strategies and a hybrid personalization engine. The user model employs expressive description logics to describe assumptions about the user and to infer implicit user features from user's descriptions as required by an application system. An application scenario in the tourism domain and a Web-based Java prototype provide an experimental validation of the research framework and identified personalization techniques.