Ontological technologies for user modelling

This paper brings together research from two different fields – user modelling and web ontologies – in attempt to demonstrate how recent semantic trends in web development can be combined with the modern technologies of user modelling. Over the last several years, a number of user-adaptive systems have been exploiting ontologies for the purposes of semantics representation, automatic knowledge acquisition, domain and user model visualisation and creation of interoperable and reusable architectural solutions. Before discussing these projects, we first overview the underlying user modelling and ontological technologies. As an example of the project employing ontology-based user modelling, we present an experiment design for translation of overlay student models for relative domains by means of ontology mapping.