Personalization of tourist application using semantic technologies

Abstract

The main research question this thesis tried to answer was: Using semantic technologies and information collected from a user's social network profile, is it possible to generate a reliable model of that user's interests?" Some research has been done using semantic technologies to create user models, and social networks have been used to collect information about the user's interests in order to apply that information to recommender systems. This project however contributed to the field by investigating the combination of using Facebook as a source for the user's interests, and using semantic technologies (topic modelling and RDF modelling) of that information to create a user model which will be applied to a different domain. Tourist recom- mendations were chosen as the other domain because of personal love of travelling and problems with finding the right kind of information about new destinations. A prototype Android tourist application was developed to demonstrate the concept. The conclusion of the project was that it is possible to create a reliable model of the user's interest using topic modelling and RDF- modelling of the user's Facebook information. There was however potential for improvement in applying this user model to the tourist domain.