Web Personalization can be defined as any set of actions that can tailor the Web experience to a particular user or set of users. To achieve effective personalization, organizations must rely on all available data, including the usage and click-stream data (reflecting user behaviour), the site content, the site structure, domain knowledge, as well as user demographics and profiles. In addition, efficient and intelligent techniques are needed to mine this data for actionable knowledge, and to effectively use the discovered knowledge to enhance the users' Web experience. The aim of the International Workshop on Adaptive and Personalized Semantic Web that was held in the Sixteenth ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia (September 6-9, 2005, Salzburg, Austria) was to bring together researchers and practitioners in the fields of web engineering, adaptive hypermedia, semantic web technologies, knowledge management, information retrieval, user modelling, and other related disciplines which provide enabling technologies for personalization and adaptation on the World Wide Web. The book contains the papers presented during the workshop. Presentations of the papers are available online at www.hci.gr.

Web personalization can be defined as any set of actions that can tailor the Web experience to a particular user or set of users. This book talks about effective personalization, the usage and click-stream data (reflecting user behaviour), the site content, the site structure, domain knowledge, as well as user demographics and profiles.

This state-of-the-art survey provides a systematic overview of the ideas and techniques of the adaptive Web and serves as a central source of information for researchers, practitioners, and students. The volume constitutes a comprehensive and carefully planned collection of chapters that map out the most important areas of the adaptive Web, each solicited from the experts and leaders in the field.

Semantics in Adaptive and Personalised Services, initially strikes one as a specific and perhaps narrow domain. Yet, a closer examination of the term reveals much more. On one hand there is the issue of semantics. Nowadays, this most often refers to the use of OWL, RDF or some other XML based ontology description language in order to represent the entities of problem. Still, semantics may also very well refer to the consideration of the meanings and concepts, rather than arithmetic measures, regardless of the representation used. On the other hand, there is the issue of adaptation, i.e. automated re-configuration based on some context. This could be the network and device context, the application context or the user context; we refer to the latter case as personalization. From a different perspective, there is the issue of the point of view from which to examine the topic. There is the point of view of tools, referring to the algorithms and software tools one can use, the point of view of the methods, referring to the abstract methodologies and best practices one can follow, as well as the point of view of applications, referring to successful and pioneering case studies that lead the way in research and innovation. Or at least so we thought. Based on the above reasoning, the editors identified key researchers and practitioners in each of the aforementioned categories and invited them to contribute a corresponding work to this book. However, as the authors’ contributions started to arrive, the editors also started to realize that although these categories participate in each chapter to different degrees, none of them can ever be totally obsolete from them. Moreover, it seems that theory and methods are inherent in the development of tools and applications and inversely the application is also inherent in the motivation and presentation of tools and methods.

Realizing the growing importance of semantic adaptation and personalization of media, the editors of this book brought together leading researchers and practitioners of the field to discuss the state-of-the-art, and explore emerging exciting developments. This volume comprises extended versions of selected papers presented at the 1st International Workshop on Semantic Media Adaptation and Personalization (SMAP 2006), which took place in Athens in December 2006.

This monograph gives a complete overview of the techniques and the methods for semantics-aware content representation and shows how to apply such techniques in various use cases, such as recommender systems, user profiling and social media analysis. Throughout the book, the authors provide an extensive analysis of the techniques currently proposed in the literature and cover all the available tools and libraries to implement and exploit such methodologies in real-world scenarios. The book first introduces the problem of information overload and the reasons why content-based information needs to be taken into account. Next, the basics of Natural Language Processing are provided, by describing operations such as tokenization, stopword removal, lemmatization, stemming, part-of-speech tagging, along with the main problems and issues. Finally, the book describes the different approaches for semantics-aware content representation: such approaches are split into ‘exogenous’ and ‘endogenous’ ones, depending on whether external knowledge sources as DBpedia or geometrical models and distributional semantics are used, respectively. To conclude, several successful use cases and an extensive list of available tools and resources to implement the approaches are shown. Semantics in Adaptive and Personalised Systems definitely fills the gap between the extensive literature on content-based recommender systems, natural language processing, and the different types of semantics-aware representations.