Wiki-rec: A semantic-based recommendation system using Wikipedia as an ontology

Nowadays, satisfying user needs has become the main challenge in a variety of web applications. Recommender systems play a major role in that direction. However, as most of the information is present in a textual form, recommender systems face the challenge of efficiently analyzing huge amounts of text. The usage of semantic-based analysis has gained much interest in recent years. The emergence of ontologies has yet facilitated semantic interpretation of text. However, relying on an ontology for performing the semantic analysis requires too much effort to construct and maintain the used ontologies. Besides, the currently known ontologies cover a small number of the world's concepts especially when a non-domain-specific concepts are needed. This paper proposes the use of Wikipedia as ontology to solve the problems of using traditional ontologies for the text analysis in text-based recommendation systems. A full system model that unifies semantic-based analysis with a collaborative via content recommendation system is presented.