A novel approach for the population and adaptation of ontology-based user profiles

User personalisation within context-aware applications has become increasingly prevalent in recent years. The use of ontologies enriched with semantics has enabled the creation of highly relevant user profiles, which have been used to facilitate the personalisation of assistive services. Existing work highlights the challenge of aiding non-expert users to intuitively manage their own profiles. This paper details a new approach to help enable the automatic creation, population and adaptation of ontology-based user profiles. Primarily, the research aims to create and enrich ontological profiles over time, for the purposes of user personalisation. The approach has been realised through the development of an intuitive desktop application, which has been evaluated through a series of experiments. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014.