Personalizing web surfing with semantically enriched personal profiles

Personalization mechanisms on the web today are clumsy and obtrusive, because users need to log in to multiple websites and enter their personal information and preferences separately for each. In addition, the user profile is different for each website and cannot be combined with other information on the web. Using Semantic Web technologies, in particular FOAF, we can identify the person browsing to the website. In this paper, we propose an extension of the HTTP GET method to include a new parameter that points to the URL of the user’s FOAF file. This simple, but powerful extension enables the web server to use information contained in the person’s FOAF file to personalize the web pages returned. We also present a proof-of-concept implementation by customizing our institute welcome page using a visitor’s FOAF file.