Ontology-style Web usage model for semantic Web applications

Current semantic recommender systems aim to exploit the website ontologies to produce valuable web recommendations. However, Web usage knowledge for recommendation is presented separately and differently from the domain ontology, this leads to the complexity of using inconsistent knowledge resources. This paper aims to solve this problem by proposing a novel ontology-style model of Web usage to represent the non-taxonomic visiting relationship among the visited pages. The output of this model is an ontology-style document which enables the discovered web usage knowledge to be sharable and machine-understandable in semantic Web applications, such as recommender systems. A case study is presented to show how this model is used in conjunction of the web usage mining and web recommendation. Two real-world datasets are used in the case study.