Ontology-Based Multidimensional Personalization Modeling for the Automatic Generation of Mashups in Next-Generation Portals

Recently, the combination of Portal and mashup technology has gained some attention. Portals were originally designed as single points of access to the information and applications distributed across the enterprise. However, due to the increasing number of resources available through Portals, they have gained a new challenging goal: To provide users with the information tailored to their individual needs and geared to the situation they are working in. Mashups, the tools that dynamically integrate independent applications, seem to be a good technique to achieve this goal. What is needed, however, are means to automatically create personalized mashups that optimally fit a user's information needs in a given situation. In this paper, we describe our approach to this automatic mashup generation. At the core of our approach are different ontology-based models that describe the user, the domain, possible information needs in this domain, and personalization rules determining which information to present to which user in which situation.