An ontology-based recommendation system for people with autism and technology apps: Ontology application for helping persons with autism

The research about the use of technology for persons with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) has rapidly increased in the last decade. This fact has accompanied with the sharp development and use of apps for mobile devices by these people and their caregivers. The election of the adequate apps for persons with autism is a very difficult task, with many variables involved with the person with ASD, the family, the practitioners and the community where they live. This paper describes a recommendation system that reuse an ontology, which supports the information about the apps and all the variables previously cited. The data about the apps are automatically obtained from recognized web repositories and reports published on Facebook/Twitter from experts. This hybrid recommendation system gets the data from the ontology, in order to score the technology and to recommend the best set of apps for the studied person1.