User profile ontology to support personalization for e-coaching systems

Abstract

In recent years, e-coaching systems have played an increasingly significant role in promoting a healthy lifestyle and positive behavior change. Research efforts have grown to provide more useful and effective e-coaching systems for research or other purposes. The implementation of e-coaching systems resulting from these efforts utilizes several techniques including Artificial Intelligence (AI) methodologies. This study proposes a personalised approach to support an e-coaching system that is tailored to the user’s characteristics. A key component of this system comprises an ontological model of the user profile. The objective of this research was to propose an ontology that is able to collect and analyze the user related information as well as customize the profiles with the most appropriate coaching recommendation or materials. The ontology employed in this study was developed using the OWL (Ontology Web Language), a knowledge representation language for authoring ontologies. The effectiveness of this approach will be enhanced by filtering the information that was presented to the users.