An Ontology-Based Recommendation System for Elderly and Disabled Persons

Abstract

In this paper, we describe the use of a hierarchical ontology representation as a basis for modelling user preferences in the SAID project for elderly and disabled persons. The nodes of the ontology tree are associated with either pre-selected or dynamically found web sites relevant for each topic of the user s interest (in this way web-surfing can be substituted by browsing through the ontology). In order to further reduce the complexity of the tree, we combine this approach with applying a probability based recommendation system which monitors the user s actions and adapts itself according to the observed behaviour. We also show that the resulting ontology tree is compatible with Bayesian networks and discuss limitations and possible extensions.