Personalization in Geographical Information Search

My PhD project focuses on the personalization of Participatory GIS (PGIS). In the project I analyze two methodologies to offer personalized search results in community maps and a natural interaction with the system. The first consists of automatically gathering the users interests at a concept level in order to generate clusters of concepts useful for the presentation of thematic maps. This is done by creating ontology-based user models mapped to the domain ontology adopted by the PGIS. The second concerns the creation of content-based user models useful for filtering the items belonging to each concept in a multifaceted way: the goal is that of reducing and adapting the information space presented in the map. In the project I also analyze how these techniques may be jointly used during the query expansion process to retrieve more accurate and relevant search results.