Web Personalization Approaches: A Survey

Abstract: Retrieving the most relevant information for the Web becomes difficult because of the huge amount of documents available in various formats. It is mandatory for the users to go through the long list of snippets and to choose their relevant one, which is a time consuming process. User satisfaction is secondary in this aspect. One approach to satisfy the requirements of the user is to personalize the information available on the Web, called Web Personalization. Web Personalization is the process that adapts information or services provided by a Web to the needs of each specific or set of users, taking the facts of the knowledge gained from the users. Web Personalization can be the solution to the information overload problem, as its objective is to provide users with what they really want or need, without having to ask or search for it explicitly. It is a multi discipline area for putting together data and producing personalized output for individual users or groups of users. This approach helps the researchers to improve the efficiency of Information Retrieval (IR) systems. By considering all the benefits of the Web Personalization, this paper presents elaborately the various approaches used by researchers to achieve Web Personalization in Web Mining.

Keywords: Information Retrieval, Semantic Web, Ontology, Web Personalization, User Profile, Personalized Search, Personalized Ontology.