The second project uses the general concept of the Personal Internet
developed within the Personal Content Manager (PeCMan) to build a
context-aware personalized search environment for a user. The World Wide
Web is advancing towards greater personalization. Users have personal
accounts on different web services and can access their private content
or share it with others. Web services such as Flickr or Youtube allow
users to store and search for data via keyword tags. However, as more
web services are offered on the Web, it is becoming increasingly
difficult for users to manage their content online. Currently, tagged
data consists of flat keyword searches. The limitation to this type of
search is that it does not use the information of the user or data that
is being searched. I propose using a tag ontology to leverage
information from the metadata of the user and resource, in addition to
the tagged keyword, in order to present more meaningful search results
to the user. Metadata about the user can include a user.s profile,
demographic, or context; whereas metadata about the resource may include
the type, size, or context of the document being searched.
Additionally, with the use of ontologies, tags can now be shared and
reused by different web services. A public repository can hold these tag
ontologies and applications can download and make use of them. I.ve
designed the following: 1) a tag ontology that includes context
information of the user and data being tagged 2) a framework that
performs context-aware searching of ontology-based tagged data by using
this tag ontology. I.m in the process of implementing a prototype of
this and hope to show that the use of tag ontologies provide more
meaningful results within a user.s context compared to flat tag
searches.