Personalized interfaces for a Semantic Web portal: Tourism information search

The present generation of Web browsers provides minimal support to assist users in browsing, making queries and checking results. Although many web sites tried to make their interfaces user friendly and easy to manage, there are no or little ones that ensure the user interface to provide high quality in use for all users who still find difficulties to find what they are looking for on the Web. In this paper, we address this problem by introducing a methodology for designing interfaces of tourism Web portals that adds personalization facilities. Our methodology reflects both the easy use of the Web and the adaptability to the user's characteristics and preferences. To do this, we investigate the use of the Semantic Web and the Web Usage Mining in order to help a user to explore an information space. To validate the methodology, a semantic search portal tool was designed and is on the way to be implemented as a part of a tourism portal for the Eiffel project(1).