Ontology-based User Modeling for Chinese Crop Germplasm Resources Information System

Personalized service has achieved great success in the field of e-commerce, it is also used to agriculture information service for improving service efficiency, and a key feature in developing successful personalized service is to construct user model that represents accurately a user’s interests. This paper presents an ontology-based dynamic user modeling approach to construct user model for Chinese Crop Germplasm Resources Information System (CGRIS). The proposed user model relies on individual register information, domain ontology and web logs. The process of user modeling is mainly divided into three steps, the paper first constructs crop germplasm resources domain ontology based on these data of CGRIS and relational database, then constructs user ontology by user registration information, and maps the domain ontology and user ontology, so the initial user model is built, finally extends and updates the initial user model using WordNet and web logs to form the final user model. This paper mainly deals with the problem of constructing user ontology and how user model is updated dynamically by web logs with time going, and the user model is a user-centered design, it reflects the individual needs of the users. Due to the powerful knowledge representation formalism and associated inference mechanisms of ontology, the ontology-based user model provides an effective mechanism to provide targeted service for the users of CGRIS.